


someone you cannot live without

by stave



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Golden Deer Route Spoilers, I didn't ask for this and neither did you, Lorenz grew on OP like a fungus, M/M, Minor Cyril/Lysithea von Ordelia, Minor Marianne von Edmund/Hilda Valentine Goneril, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, but here we are, haha is that leonatz?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-13
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2020-12-14 17:56:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21019874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stave/pseuds/stave
Summary: He feels a horrible, awful hypocrite, but Claude smiles at him, closed-mouth and true.Ah,comes a thought riding on the pang in his chest.This is how religions are made.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I disliked Lorenz for three-fourths of the game. Joke's on me, huh?

There is a pier that stretches into the Airmid. 

Lorenz, not old enough to read magical texts but old enough still to be trusted to stand on his own two feet, sits upon it with his legs dangling over the water. The great river is slow and wide here. He has not yet seen the sea, so this smooth passing of snow melt and prairie rain impresses upon him a mortal awe. The stars varnish its fine rippling with silver and he is mesmerized.

His father has brought him along to a minor lord’s confirmation celebration. His governess stands at the head of the pier, hands folded, quietly watching Lorenz contemplate the view. Up the bank, sitting above one hundred willow’s susurrus, a limestone villa glows yellow from the inside. Clinking glass and drifting strings butt up against the sound of water slipping past the piles.

It is hard to see the opposite shore in the dark. The Adrestian Empire sits in its shadow, each lit window a prick of gold set into the low hills that lead south. His father often turns his gaze there. He says, “The House of Gloucester is yours.” He says, hands firm on the leather securing Lorenz’s pony’s bit, “The House of Gloucester has maintained its independence for this many generations.”

By then, he hasn’t seen the Great Bridge of Myrddin, either. That will come later. And so in that moment, shivering and lighter than air, he cannot begin to imagine how great it must truly be. Lorenz does not quite yet know what it is for, that fortified hulk of stone and mortar.

Again, that will come later. But until then, he is Lorenz Hellman Gloucester, the young first son of a Dukedom neither very low nor very high on a shifting ladder of power. All he comprehends is that his father wants more than what they have.

He is not an ungifted child. His tutors fawn over his elocution and his ear for pattern. He likes to read, and his mother likes sitting with him as she reads, too. She asks him questions and offers answers to his own, violet eyes not so different from his. They glitter in firelight as he finds his way through blocks of text. They are always turned to him when he looks up from his page to make certain that she remains by his side.

His father is the one who lifts him onto his first pony. Lorenz has, of course, ridden double in front of his father or his father’s captains more times than he could hope to count. The rise and fall of a horse beneath him is not new but the tugging of leather through his soft hands is. His pony bends time and time again to grab mouthfuls of grass and for weeks, Lorenz fails to see each attempt as it comes. He spends that first summer careening around a hunting field as his father rides by his side, smiling at the spectacle of Lorenz suffering lessons best learned by dirt-impact.

Years and years later, when Lorenz is almost grown but steeped in the terror of not reaching even that, the memory of his parents’ smiles wobbles over empty space. He becomes intimately familiar with the feel of his own blood cooling on his skin. He rises stiff and bruised some mornings after battle but never because he cannot keep his seat.

As looks back into that brief stretch of years he remembers how a bruised knee’s sting fell to wounded pride at the sight of a pony’s tail disappearing into trees. He remembers the way that wet Verdant Rain grass tore as he fisted it in his little hands. He remembers his father, huge and chuckling, bringing his charger to a stop and reaching to drag him up into the saddle.

And he remembers his mother, quiet except for their time together in that library, wiping a smear of mud from his face with her bare thumb when he rides battered and victorious into the courtyard.

Then, he’ll remember Claude von Riegan standing close, gaze level and mouth soft as he says he trusts Lorenz not to spoil their plans. The Professor hovers at his shoulder and there is also no question to be found in her eyes. He is known, and his path snakes away from the House of Gloucester he was born to maintain. He is aware that history might note the divergence as one of some importance, but regardless of his place in any telling, Lorenz walks away from the tradition of his family’s house, toward a world in which his lip service may turn out to be more than that.

…

House Riegan’s balancing act comes to a disastrous end. The clatter and crash of Godfrey’s untimely demise echoes through every Alliance House. Count Gloucester’s long evenings at council lengthen, then double. He smiles often. Effortlessly.

The house wakes like a slumbering beast in a beloved tale, dust falling from its shoulders as its chest swells, breath billowing. And though the bones of Gloucester have not shifted for longer than Lorenz has been alive the soul inside has been hard at work. Anticipation ripens on the tongue. The floors, in the midst of a political cataclysm, are scrubbed past shining. The formal receiving chamber becomes an enormous mirror, House Gloucester’s banners irrefutable when viewed in echoed repeat. Lorenz thinks that one must feel held in the jaws of a huge, purple beast, standing at the foot of the Count’s seat.

There are many dinners. He dances at every one and does not say much of anything that means something for all his talking. The daughters and nieces of Alliance lords unconditionally avoid him, much to his consternation and later mortification.

His father shapes mazes from words and Lorenz stays where he has been directed, no less loss than anyone else even for the pride in the Count’s voice when he introduces his heir. He is a busy man. He has brought Gloucester to this height. They are ready to drop onto Riegan’s exposed neck.

Lorenz, eighteen, does not have the honor of sitting beside his father at council. He stirs steaming cups of tea and watches flower petals roll in the eddy. He swings his lance ten thousand times waiting for summons. Then, finding himself at loose ends, swings it ten thousand more.

Next year, he will be a student enrolled in the Officer’s Academy at Garreg Mach Monastery. He holds this certainty close to himself, bolstering nerves he cannot shake because he has never felt uncertainty like this. The hope – the tallest chair at the round table – has plagued half the conversations his father broaches, for after Riegan’s stumbling he seems unable to talk of anything else.

Their family is at dinner scarcely two moons later when an emissary is waved into the room. The brightness of her gold coat clashes with Gloucester’s maroon and deep violet, too bright and altogether incomprehensible even before the woman opens her mouth and reassures all present that Duke Riegan has recovered a grandson.

Count Gloucester’s hands do not tighten on his cutlery. He sets aside his spoon, then takes a sip of his wine. His shoulders are straight and relaxed beneath the weight of the table’s brittle silence. Lorenz’s chest begins to burn. He realizes that he has been holding his breath, but does not release it.

“Tell Duke Riegan,” he hears through the fuzz of shock, “that I am gratified to learn of this reunion.”

The omission of from exactly _where _one might recover a legitimate, crested heir does not go ignored. His father poses the question over and over, as if holding it differently in his mouth might summon the answer itself, and seems to think little of Lorenz’s own guesses. He submits to voicing dutiful agreement, hands stinging from the rasp of his lance’s hilt, and is unsure where to place his feet except forward to the Oghma.

He and the von Riegan heir will be classmates. Lorenz comes to terms with this as he closes his traveling trunk’s lid and rubs the lines of his family crest. His father’s expectations fit like last year’s cloak, just somewhat taut across his back, short at the wrists.

His fingers tighten around his pride.

His grip does not falter through the spring and into the summer. Claude has the bearing of a cat seen in passing, casual in all but the direction of his supposed wandering. He often naps in the forest outside the monastery walls, but his archery and class marks are unrivaled. He is unfailingly casual with the Professor. He tends to dine as part of a group, presenting personal queries rapid-fire but dodging any turned his way.

Despite his apparent familiarity with the skill of planned conversation, he is not flawlessly adept. Lorenz sees every awkward misstep.

“Derdriu is so cold in the winter, on all that water,” Hilda remarks to Claude one day, pushing the rest of her meal Raphael’s way. She raises her voice over his wordless shout of joy. “What do you even do?”

“Well,” says Claude, with a hesitation so slight Lorenz is sure he’s the only one at the table who’s caught it, “I’m a particular fan of skating.”

By the time the fishing pond has frozen over, his avoidance of the ice is one of many hints that have found their way to Lorenz. The full picture of who Claude is and what he wants has been within view the entire time. Perhaps it is a testament to his dedication that it still takes years for each piece to find its place in Lorenz’s mind.

When he first comes to face it, the truth lands like a leather-wrapped fist in his gut. It opens the ground beneath his feet, because -

Without too much effort an Almyran accent could be veiled as laziness, a skipping of enunciation for better banter. And the earrings, ever-present and polished to gleaming, might suggest more than vanity. There is the braid, always neatly done up, then the ease with which he handles axes. And while Lorenz has yet to see him wield one on the field himself, he has begun to hear tale of Claude at battle with his bow and sword set aside.

Lorenz accounted the flourish with which Claude presents Hilda her axes to an intrinsic dexterity. There is no comfort in the idea that he has been only half wrong about the whole of it. After all, every noble Almyran child is rumored to begin weapon training by throwing axes at targets until they learn to never miss. Not even once.

The horizon tips, or the frame shifts and straightens. Lorenz watches Claude in the space of what has been exposed.

In the way Claude observes their classmates at practice, Lorenz, shortsighted and foolish, failed to discern meaning. Time after time, he allowed himself to be misled despite every spasm of his own intuition. He is three steps behind someone born to climb to greater heights, look down, and adjust the scene with a benevolent hand.

Claude’s calculation introduces itself as a climbing dream, some freshly green and rooted growth that buds intention, ambition. Those and everything between burn holes from a shaded corner of the monastery, striking into the sunbaked tile of the training yard’s courtyard as battalions drill. Lorenz has nothing to do with the knowledge but sit beside it, acknowledging its weight but unable to shift it one way or another.

Claude, impossible as he is, comes into focus. He is near indomitable and cleverer than half their class combined. In the first frostbitten moons of 1180, Lorenz’s letters home to his father do not mention the country to their east. Those he receives in return by way of courier wane in number and length.

Claude’s is a deep, widening quiet. It lies in a thick sheet beneath the sound of blunted arrows and dull blades on packed straw at the Officer’s Academy. It sits to attention at his feet when he stands between burning trees at the edge of Gronder Field. It looks Lorenz in the eye as the Leicester Alliance is sent into the full tilt of war with one lifted hand and not a single word.

He cannot look away.

Memory falls in waves and sends him reeling. The truth has been present all along, and so have hints: the table manners hidden from Lorenz with pointed jokes; the loops of green and yellow silk Lorenz once glimpses hanging from a bedpost in their academy days; the poetry which is perhaps not poetry but a mode of prayer from a land that could make someone like Claude von Riegan.

It fits, then: if he must be a man who prays, it is not to any deity Lorenz has ever known.

…

Their war chamber is the same as any of the monastery’s second-floor rooms except for the outwardly opening doors, which make entering in force difficult and exiting with speed simple. The Professor arranges the tables herself. Bizarrely, Lorenz feels unprepared, as if he has forgotten to study in preparation for a graded, class-wide discussion.

“Those look heavy,” says Raphael, the first of them to speak above the screeching of wooden legs against dusty stone. “I’ll help!”

The Professor’s head tilts to one side as she considers him. There is much of him to see: he has broadened a considerable amount. Despite this, the shirt he wears stays fastened at its buttons. Lorenz has not spoken to him since that first outrageous reunion. They had shaken hands as laughter and pants of relief reverberated in the wreckage of Garreg Mach, but Lorenz can’t bring himself to look him in the eye. He has at last realized who Raphael might blame for his parents’ deaths if he were the kind of man who could hold a grudge.

“You won’t break them?”

The Professor’s face moves in confused starts as she runs a hand across the surface of one. Lorenz has seen her standing in the yard outside the trashed remains of their classroom, staring at the winter-dead vines choking the pillars and benches. Her cheeks, flushed in the cold, are always dry.

Raphael’s smile is tight around the edges and his eyes too wide as he says, laughing, “No, Professor.”

The territory from which Raphael hails has been riddled with bandits since the Empire’s campaign against the Kingdom began. Lorenz heard reports despite his father’s neglect to include him in briefings. Thoughts of their classmates had been helpless, then. He had felt that he may never see the commoners again.

There is a scar carved into underside of Raphael’s forearm, pink and shiny and wide as his thumb. He acts much the same, but there is a deliberateness to his movements that cannot go unseen. It is not improbable that Raphael has learned precisely how much strength it takes to break whatever ends up in his hands.

The Professor nods and turns her back to the lot of them loitering in the entryway. Raphael joins her, careful not to step into her way.

“I’ve got déjà vu right now,” Claude whispers, leaning a fraction into his space. Lorenz’s eyes are in line with the top of his head. He has been having some trouble making himself unaware of the fact. “It’s almost like two worlds colliding, seeing Teach again.”

He’s smiling, but not in the way of his Academy self, like it is a tool to be used. It nears on incomprehensible and knocks one hard beat on the inside of Lorenz’s ribs. It is not often that he looks at Claude and understands what he sees, so his own disbelief makes him slow on the uptake.

“Many things have changed,” Lorenz agrees. He sets a hand to his chin, feigning engrossment at the spectacle of the Professor nitpicking the corners of their war room.

“Hmm.” Claude glances at him. His corners of his mouth twitch at the sound of a table being pushed several times in rapid succession. Lorenz bites the inside of his cheek as the Professor continues to move it inch by squeaking inch. “But some things haven’t.”

“So it appears,” says Lorenz, who is not breathing through his nose because Claude tends to wear his hair styled, and whatever keeps it from flying almost vertical all day smells like clove. His thoughts run out of order.

Claude’s turned more to face him. One of his eyebrows lifts, and there is a mischievous tilt to his chin. Lorenz prepares to hear something unbearably annoying.

“Well,” he says instead, “it is what it is.”

Lorenz has nothing to say. Claude is looking at him, stare a dragging, tangible presence. His eyes did not focus quite the same way back when they last met. Claude, unreachable, seemed to gain understanding of his classmates with startling speed. But Lorenz had seen that he avoided situations in which he might trade a private truth for another’s.

The look he gives Lorenz now slants toward conspiratorial, as though he is about to let him in on a joke.

“Unless-“

“Claude,” interrupts Hilda, voice low as she sidles up beside him, “you’re talking during class.”

“My apologies,” he says without missing a beat. The decorations at his waist bounce when he slopes toward her. She leans into him, too, hands behind her back, strong shoulder knocking into his side. Lorenz shifts his weight back to center.

“No,” Hilda scolds, whispering, “I meant, you’re talking during class without me.”

“This hardly counts as class,” Lorenz feels the need to point out, although the Professor has finished arranging furniture and moved on to investigating Leonie’s bow, which is huge and beautifully carved. She does not speak, but nods at the right times as Leonie talks. It is – nostalgic.

Hilda shrugs.

“I give it three minutes ‘till Leonie is trying to goad Teach into a match.” Claude crosses his arms. “She’s eager to prove herself.”

“Makes sense.” Hilda tilts her head. “Leonie’s one of the toughest mercenaries out there right now. She’s basically followed in J- the Professor’s footsteps.”

“No,” Lorenz says, and the pitch of it is possibly a bit too low, unhappy. “No one is surprised.”

They stand in silence for an uncomfortable moment.

“I’ve been thinking about the other Houses,” Hilda admits. She shakes her head, but Lorenz is watching how Claude’s hands tighten around his arms, then relax. “About how we might have to fight them.”

“More than might,” Lorenz tells her, the firmness a frail barrier between distress and the part of him that liked drinking tea with Ferdinand von Aegir.

“It’s too much work to worry about it,” she murmurs, brushing dirt Lorenz cannot see from her clothes. “But… I can’t help it.”

“You’re not the only one.” Claude straightens. The set of his jaw is stubborn, but he looks more tired than the rest of them. “But for now, that doesn’t change anything.”

_For now_.

“Claude,” says the Professor, and though her voice is not raised, it snags his attention without delay. She has finished her organizing at last and hovers with her hands empty at her sides, staring.

“Looks good, Teach,” Claude answers. “Hey, who’s hungry?”

“We all know who-“ Leonie starts, smile growing, before she is drowned out by Raphael’s excitement. Lorenz inclines his head to her when their eyes meet, and she winks.

They remain in the fragile space created by reminiscence, leaning into the familiarity, peeking at what is too changed to resemble memory but not discussing it quite yet. Hilda seems to have much to say. The majority of it is meaningless and bright, but she trails her fingers along the rough stonework of the halls as they walk. Leonie and Ignatz’s voices are mild from behind Lorenz’s back. Marianne and the Professor bring up the rear, the former’s steps long and light, the latter’s broad, her shoulders pushed back. She moves well for a woman entombed in stone for the better part of five years.

Lysithea falls into stride beside him. She wears House Ordelia’s colors in no uncertain terms, and the traditional veil covering the bulk of her hair is a rich velvet. His father has spoken little of Ordelia since the fall of Garreg Mach, but Lorenz spent those years straining for even a rumor. She is whole and well walking beside him, and he smiles in greeting. A wistfulness uncurls inside him at the sight of her.

He understands how it is to be the sole heir of his House, has never questioned his place, but to be treasured –

“Your magic is improved,” she says, disrupting the thought.

“Yes.” Gloucester, for the most part, was kind enough to leave him plenty of time for reading. “Thank you.”

She studies the side of his face. She, too, has not grown much at all. Lorenz and Raphael are the tallest of them by not a small margin.

“You’re quiet,” she notes. That distraction so common in their Academy days seems to be missing - her focus does not move through or beyond him. “Is that unusual for you, now?”

He reflects on it.

“No,” he says, finding humor easier to grasp than dismally shaded honesty. “Something must get me going, first. Then it is difficult to stop.”

It works.

“I see,” she says, and she isn’t laughing, but he suspects she might be, soon. “Then we are still alike, in that regard.”

“You mean easy to rile up?” They’ve caught Claude’s attention, and he looks over his shoulder, smirking.

“Oh,” Hilda groans. “Don’t start them _both_.”

“Yes, Claude.” Lorenz puts his nose in the air. “Don’t.”

“Pah.” He turns to face forward, striding into the dusty dining hall without pause. One hand waves dismissal. “You’re too easy, anyways.”

“Hmph,” goes Lorenz, though he cannot find it in him to disagree. Lysithea hides her smiling mouth behind her palm, though, so it might be worth it.

…

There is a dream that comes to him some evenings deep into the darkness. What has been buried meets him halfway when there is nowhere left to run. He is forced to face himself.

It is night. There is a fire in the distance, and it is a large, angry red, but far enough away that the sounds are small and unimportant. He stands on the crenellations of Garreg Mach with his bare hands burning in the cold. The skin across his knuckles is dry and tight when he flexes them, dragging along smooth stone placed long ago, solid and separate from whatever tragedy unfolds down the slope. When he looks to his own body, there is a black cavity instead of the nightshirt he ought to be wearing.

“Huh,” says Claude, because if Lorenz dreams, he is often present. “That looks bad.”

And this is where the image of him tends to smear. Sometimes there is a braid hanging by his face, and the line of his shoulders is short and lean. He twirls an arrow between his fingers, the shaft of it blurring, the head whistling as it slices through air. More frequently, he is the Claude who emerged from the wrecked monastery with the Professor trailing a step behind. The hair he’s let grow along the sides of his face frames a serious expression. The slope of his nose is gentle above the anxious pull of his mouth.

He looks from the fire to Lorenz, who is empty, with crossed arms. There is a challenge there in his stare.

“You gonna do anything about it?”

His mouth is dry. He cannot make a sound, though he aches to say _yes_. He lifts his hands, reaches. They catch on nothing and fall.

“Well,” says Claude, whose skin is warm even in the moonlight, “don’t know what I expected.”

He points the arrow at him. The smile tucked onto his face is painful. Stiff. He shrugs, a hundred silent accusations turned Lorenz’s way.

He murmurs, “You can say it, you know.” He gestures, iron arrowhead glinting, and it encompasses all that Lorenz is with one wave, ingrained nonsense to hard-earned wisdom and back again. “But that would ruin all of this, right?”

The fire is red and far away. It is the only thing to be seen from this view besides Claude, but he can’t be forced to look at either. He closes his eyes.

“You can say it,” Claude repeats. His voice is unbearably kind. “I wish you’d just say it.”

Lorenz wakes in a haze, bile burning the back of his throat. It’s caustic, but won’t dissolve what lies lodged there, unsaid and unwanted. He washes down both with water from the well and settles into the weight of his armor, centering around the feel of it keeping him tied to the ground. He imagines it a barrier between the emptiness gnawing beneath it and the fire still burning beyond and carries on, head in the sand.

But he has never been much of a liar, even by omission.

…

The Professor assigns Lorenz basic duty tasks.

It doesn’t so much hurt his pride as scuff it. Or, maybe, the disappointment is what puts a ding right at the center of a slow-growing self-assuredness not built on the insane yearning to have his love hidden and accepted simultaneously. To be loved in return, despite his refusal of it.

The embarrassment of every recalled monastery conversation keeps him quiet. There are too many women to whom he cannot speak even five years later. He pens apologies in anticipation. They still come unevenly out of him in the moment, but he supposes he deserves his own inelegance.

He has been awake since the first small hours of the morning, and he is hungry in the way that stays with the body, hollowing the tips of his fingers. The moon closes in on one horizon. The sun is but a lightening indigo along the edge of the other. There may be no other place in Fódlan we would rather be.

Leonie, also astride, comes up beside him, raising an eyebrow and switching reins to pass him her refilled canteen. The water inside sloshes. He thanks her and takes a drink. 

Such breaches of propriety mean less and less with every week. Lorenz finds himself comfortable on his thin cot in a drafty tent in the middle of the wilderness. He washes his face with water from cold-running streams and eats his meals seated on logs, stones, crates of provisions. He has discovered an ant bite on his ankle, and is only certain that is all it is because he’s asked Marianne.

The experience in its entirety has been illuminating, to say the least.

“So?” Leonie glances at him, then out into the basin they’re to march through that day.

She ties the canteen to her saddle when he returns it to her hand. Her mare shifts weight, ears flicking forward then back, and stills as Leonie runs an absent hand down her neck. Her horsemanship is rough but practical in comparison to his own, having been honed by life or death experiences.

“Nothing yet.” He’s been peering through the blue-purple murk of dawn for any hint of movement. His own horse has long since fallen into a three-legged doze beneath him. “You?”

She shakes her head and purses her lips. The quiver on her back shivers with the motion, each fletched arrow whispering against another. She’s tied her hair back instead of letting it fall long and loose. The orange of it brightens with every second as the sun creeps into sight. 

With the light comes a cold wind that gusts up the valley toward them. The pines below sway and sweep, revealing strips of bare gray rock and rich earth in turns. They both shudder when it reaches their post. 

It’s beautiful, this moment with Leonie at what may be the end of the world. Their eyes meet and they share a smile, the simplest understanding passing in an instant removed from the barely contained brushfire of the Alliance’s main camp. Lorenz leans into the wind, breathes out as it passes by, and watches the forest move. 

And move. 

“Leonie,” he hears himself say, low and measured despite the ice that cuts through his veins. 

“Fuck,” she says, more succinctly than anything Lorenz can offer. “I’ll-“

She’s turning her horse on its haunches as he unclasps the book hanging by his side. Whatever else she’s said is lost to hooves on mountain gravel and the sudden lurching of Lorenz’s pulse in his ears. He doesn’t turn to watch her ride into the trees.

He trots east across the ridge, climbing a circling rise, hoping for a better glimpse of the enemy’s movement. The roll and clank of what could be a sizeable infantry force better reaches him in a gash of a clearing.

Trees and brush block most of the view, but the Empire’s symbol has been seared into his memory. He recognizes it as easily as he recognizes his own family crest. The world around him narrows to crimson banners fluxing and jerking in the rising wind, then to the shadowed line of cloaks behind them.

Those long, beaked masks…

He is too busy squinting down into the valley to think to check behind him. The Professor’s voice - _focus, Lorenz_ \- echoes in his ears as the first arrow traces a thin line of fire across the front of his throat. His horse sidesteps, and only its surefootedness saves them both as the second buries itself half to the feather in dirt.

What follows has since been lost to Lorenz’s waking mind. At the end of those desperate few minutes in the pines, he stands on his own two feet above three dead soldiers. A fine score: two axes, one bow to his lance and Reason.

Ash drifts through the air. It is bone-white in the fully risen sun and settles like snow on his shoulders.

When he dismounts at camp, the Professor, who has been waiting, seizes him by the shoulder and beneath the chin. She jerks up his head to bare his throat and wipes the blood Lorenz has forgotten is there. Their eyes meet. He swallows.

“Pay attention,” she instructs, voice hoarse with disuse, bright irises flecked by the tiniest pricks of black, “to your surroundings.”

“Yes, Professor,” he whispers, because there is nothing else to say.

Marianne replaces the Professor’s hand with her own, and her smile and very mortal eyes put solid ground beneath him once more. The scratch closes without a hint of scarring. The Professor squeezes the unarmored bend of his elbow before walking away, forward to where their army has organized into ready lines, hand tracing what it can reach of the Sword of the Creator at her hip.

…

That season, his soundless sleep morphs into something unrecognizable.

Lorenz has taken lives. He has killed in close combat and from a distance, in sleet and fine weather, but never because there were no other options. He has had the privilege of choice. This begins to change.

His father’s men stand in flanking lines to his sides. They put the weight of expectant stares to his back, which often aches and sometimes itches where blood has slipped beneath his collar. Their loyalty holds, even for coin and fear of failure’s certain consequence.

He takes to reading at night. First by lantern, then by sputtering candles of lumped wax as every ounce of oil is burned and not replaced. Ignatz’s family pulls miracles not unlike the Professor’s own so that there is food in pots above their night fires, cloth for uniform, iron for their cavalry. Times, regardless, become tight.

While the heirs and scions of the Alliance draw from family coffers and family inheritances, Lorenz stands aside with his hands crimping the edges of letters too brief to prove useful from a tactical perspective. From a familial one –

Well.

He keeps each against another folded between his clothes and settles in for dark hour after hour of waging battle against himself. There is a piece of his heart, large enough to matter, that dreams of leaving the monastery in the cold of dawn and riding for a home finally given into its own rot. Home, but not Gloucester any longer. Not a version he can understand, at least, and that disinheritance of the soul is what keeps him sifting through the rubble of Garreg Mach.

He takes his watches and stands his ground at the war table. They bend their minds around the great question of how to win this fight, then the next. He kills, and he kills, and he kills so that perhaps one day, Fódlan may not know the meaning of the word.

…

“You’re meant to be resting,” Lorenz says, bending to fit beneath the tent’s low entrance. The air outside is cool but the sky is unclouded. Golden sunlight falls upon the canvas, suffusing Ignatz and the spread of paper on his cot.

“Ah.” He smiles and sets aside his quill. The bruising along the side of his face has deepened to a dark plum. “Clerical work can’t count, can it? I’m seated.”

“It does.”

Ignatz laughs, the sound small and contained. Marianne’s magic is powerful, sometimes frighteningly so, but must also be spread between a legion's worth of wounded. Lost limbs and opened stomachs rank far above cracked ribs, no matter to whom they belong.

“You’ve just missed the professor and Claude,” Ignatz tells him. He gestures at two woven mats set on the ground beside him. “You can sit, if you’d like.”

The mats are indistinguishable, but Lorenz studies both before choosing one. He sits. The weft, he imagines, is warmer than the dirt beneath it.

“You are writing letters?”

“I finished all but the one,” Ignatz says, and waves the paper in his hand. “To my brother.”

“Ah.” He lets his eyes drift around the cramped interior. A half-finished painting has been left out to dry. Its colors trickle into blank spaces. “Your family is well?”

“Better than might be expected,” Ignatz answers, and his smile is apologetic. “Not that I don’t enjoy your company, Lorenz, but is there something you needed?”

“Do I have that look about me?”

“More of an air.” Ignatz adjusts his glasses. “We can talk about anything else, if you’d prefer.”

“You’ve already had visitors,” Lorenz says. “I am sure Claude picked your brain.”

“Only in the mildest sense.” Ignatz tilts his head to one side. “He wished me a speedy recovery.”

Lorenz, at once, feels flatfooted. “That is… nice of him.”

“He’s a nice person,” Ignatz insists. “You’re the only one who doesn’t seem to think so.”

“Perhaps my perceptiveness is a level above yours.” Lorenz straightens his spine. “Honestly, Ignatz, you speak your mind much more often than when we were in school.”

“Yes,” he agrees, and nods. “Now that I could die any day, there are plenty of things I don’t want to go unsaid.”

He looks at Lorenz. Lorenz looks at the painting.

“Is that the view from the bridge?” he asks, and pretends he can’t hear Ignatz’s soft sigh over the sounds of an army licking its wounds around them.

…

The Empire’s forces are large and fierce. They extend from one horizon to the next, a sea of red and white that breaks onto them again and again. Lorenz’s throat burns with thirst and smoke and his fingers cramp and seize in the shape they make around the hilt of his lance. His finest charger is dead. Behind his eyes, his brain has liquidized. He may have no more than two spells left curled in the marrow of his bones.

He may have none at all, but the thought doesn’t cross his mind when Claude hits earth, knocked from his perch a short distance above where the rest of them toil on the ground. _You were supposed to be safe there_, he thinks, hysterical near hilarity, and the high shriek of his wyvern drives him sprinting through the dust.

Marianne is nowhere near. He left her a score east some unknown length of time ago as he rode the line, gathering what information he could before taking the remnants of fractured units and wading once more into the thick of it. Lysithea floats above the field far ahead the heart of their command, veiled hair flowing as if underwater. She hasn’t seen what has happened. When she does -

“-_fucking longbows_,” Claude’s saying, the vulgarity ripping from him. Then the Professor appears from the frothing battle, and he laughs until blood flecks his lips.

The Professor reaches him first. She hauls him upright by the underarms and doesn’t say a word. Her mouth is a bloodless line that tightens at the dark stain crawling down his gold coat. She sheathes the Sword of the Creator, takes his weight, and holds one small hand over the fletching sprouting from his side.

“Let me help,” Lorenz rushes, one gauntlet already discarded at their feet. The magic glows green and white in his hand and Claude’s eyes are trained on it, wide and indecipherable. “Here.”

“Hm,” Claude hums, after the Professor tears the arrow free and Lorenz has poured half his consciousness into the wound left behind. He sags in her grip. “Yeah, definitely poisoned.”

The world bleaches white in a terror so profound Lorenz sways.

Hilda jumps from her wyvern and lands running, arriving just in time to grab Claude’s other arm as his knees buckle. She waves her battalion away, and her shouted orders rattle Lorenz’s ears but don’t reach further than that. The Professor gestures and another rider rises on the wind, arcing away from the sun as it lowers, fast but perhaps not fast enough.

“Lorenz?” The Professor stares into him, pupils individual grains of the blackest sand.

He sees a laceration of hot light splitting the sky and her hand on the sword that guides the cut. There is an instant, there in the crux of it, in which Lorenz wants to ask why the pallor of Claude’s skin and the sound of Hilda’s cracking voice are both so familiar. The Professor widens her stance. Her free hand, slick with blood, clenches around Claude’s wrist.

“I can,” he says, in answer to a question unspoken. “Until Marianne is here, I can.”

And he does, though his healing is elementary at best. The Royal Academy requires basic instruction in each subset, and the Professor dropped relevant textbooks onto his desk. He curses himself for any inattentiveness and arrogance. His level of learning is so low that he can only guess at what he does not understand and poison, he’s heard, is not easily mended even by the gifted. He will have to make do.

Until Marianne comes sweeping into the scene, grim-faced and steady-handed, Lorenz rediscovers the lines he has drawn for himself in the sand. The spots at the edges of his vision multiply. He kneels in the dirt, back bent, bare hand pressed to bare skin.

Lorenz is not a religious man. Not really, not past his posturing, but there is something holy in that moment. Claude von Riegan’s life remains tethered to their mortal realm because Lorenz prays it stays. The magic inside him answers and delivers a truth he’ll treat the same as all his others. His heart is a fist that he closes, and the man with green eyes and clever fingers does not die.

In fact, he lives to tell the tale.

“I’m mostly sad Lorenz didn’t cry,” Claude says afterward, when they’ve drifted apart from their war table in the monastery to talk amongst themselves. Lorenz leans on the stone wall by a window and crosses his arms, gazing out into the mountains and seeing nothing.

To avoid an awkward silence Lorenz must reply, “Cry? Me? For you?” and act as though he doesn’t feel a thing when Claude shakes his head and clicks his tongue. Leonie laughs, and Ignatz changes the subject.

Raphael is the one who carries Lorenz from the field when he faints and does not hesitate to remind him. That especially sends Claude spiraling into a mood known to at times possess him when they were at the academy. Hilda sits with a fist shoved to her mouth, failing to stifle the giggles that overcome her at the dining table. Lorenz cuts his meat with measured force and feels the skin of his face as the mask that it has so often become.

The teasing is endless. He is thankful for every other word.

…

Lorenz draws close to death a time or two. It’s hard not to, even with Claude’s schemes – which tend toward bloodless – and the Professor’s not small talents. War is war is war, and their dead are greasy smears of smoke against Fódlan’s indifferent sky. Those known personally turn to ghosts kept close to the chest. When exhaustion distends the small hours of the morning, going bloated and hollow in daylight, Lorenz contemplates his chances at a spectral afterlife.

One half-day into their armed tour of Enbarr, he thinks they might be quite high.

“Morbid,” he tells himself, which is a mistake. His bitten tongue has gone molten in his mouth. He chokes on it.

“Sir,” croaks one of the last members of his battalion. Grime hides the distinguishing features of his face, and his words are only fragments heard below the terrible bellowing of Edelgard’s beasts. “The flags – the palace has been breached.”

“Fantastic,” Lorenz says, hefting another javelin above his shoulder. It flies true, taking with it blood in the shape of his handprint. Whose blood it is, he cannot say. It doesn’t matter; it finds its mark.

Glints of painful light show through the haze, arcing off the imperial palace’s terneplate. It’s not far from where they stand ground but might as well be ten times that, because there is a full force of mages advancing down the avenue toward them.

The opera house is burning. Lorenz had witnessed the blaze set himself, still feels the heat on his face, still reels from the sight of Dorothea, arms held open before her, grimly certain with her hair twisting about her head. Sunspots dot his vision. The fireball was massive.

He’d never had the chance to apologize.

Lightning comes down too close for comfort and he throws himself out of the way, plated boots screeching against the remarkably even pavestones of Enbarr. He charges with sparks hopping up his arms and onto his shoulders, crowding the mage before they complete a second cast, and puts his blade through their gut. He turns and there is another. That one falls, too.

Time skips and drags. They push on, turning down side streets when necessary, smashing barricades and holding the flank together. It is hot, this far south. The urban sprawl leans into itself, trapping heat and noise and he catches a child’s face once, peering down at them from a third story window. It’s yanked away in an instant.

“Lorenz,” Lysithea yells as he staggers around the final turn and into view. She’s ringed by bodies that lie motionless twenty-paces out. Cyril and his wyvern stand beside her, worse for wear but arguably steadier on their feet than Lorenz himself.

He raises a hand to acknowledge her, then devotes himself to the monumental task of wading through the remnants to reach her side. They must represent the rear of their force: this plaza yawns into a bottleneck fronted by the palace’s face, which is almost obscured by the Alliance’s fist upon its door.

“How are we?” he asks, and they don’t pause to talk. She sets a brisk pace he must follow despite every small hurt making itself known. Now that mortal peril’s back to lurking, claws sheathed, his body is ready to drop like a sack of grain on any horizontal surface.

Cyril nocks an arrow to his bow as they walk. He keeps his eyes moving, scanning for threats, but he’s tilting forward as if tugged by a rope through the sternum. The embossment on his shoulder and chest guards is traditional, familiar to Lorenz as every evening mass of his life. The leather is beautifully oiled beneath flecks of drying blood. He dotes on it in the evenings with the single-minded intensity of the yearning.

Lorenz should know.

“Better than expected,” Lysithea answers, and proceeds to update him on the situation. She pauses partway through to cough and wheeze into her elbow, slippered feet slipping, then starts again as if nothing as happened. Something beneath his ribs prods at him with a sharp edge.

Claude and their generals are waiting for them. Lorenz takes a proffered water canteen and washes what he can of his hands after drinking to sate his thirst. He wipes his mouth with the back of his exposed wrist, drops of water falling into the fall of his hair.

Claude and Judith are talking with crossed arms. Neither appear to have been harmed by the day’s campaign. Judith’s hair is neat, and her eyes are clear above the shadows beneath them. Claude rubs his temple, shoulders rolling back, and offers Lorenz a nod when their gazes meet.

“You missed Dedue,” Claude says as Lorenz joins the circle. His voice is like a gourd with all the seeds removed. He holds out a folded piece of paper.

“Dedue?” Lorenz takes the paper. He blinks to bring the text into focus. “My. And here I thought the man was dead.”

Claude’s pause makes him look up. “No. He’s alive,” he says. Grief shows itself in the creases at the corners of his eyes. Lorenz angles his body between him and Judith, who’s pretending not to listen as she speaks with Lysithea and Cyril.

“These are notes on Edelgard’s palace,” Lorenz says. “Claude, has he been here – watching? Waiting to…”

“I knew you’d get it.” Claude huffs half a laugh. “Yeah. Yeah, he’s been here, and he’s going to get himself killed.”

Lorenz is too tired to keep himself from laying a hand on his shoulder and Claude is too tired to keep from leaning into it. The afternoon darkens around them as a cloud passes the sun. Their separate shadows on the ground fold into one.

“Lorenz,” he says, low and full of empty, uneasy space, “we can’t let him die.”

“No,” he agrees. He lets go of his shoulder. “As always, the fewer deaths the better.”

He feels a horrible, awful hypocrite, but Claude smiles at him, closed-mouth and true. _Ah_, comes a thought riding on the pang in his chest. _This is how religions are made._

“That’s been the plan.” Claude flexes his hands, then breathes in deeply. Lorenz can see him pack himself away one second at a time. “Well. There’s the palace, and here’s our army.”

“And the future,” Lorenz adds, obliging the mood shift. “On your command.”

“Agh. Go back to being that weird teenager who thought I was evil.” Claude buffets Lorenz with a casual shove, letting slip his Duke Riegan act just long enough to get a rise out of him.

“Never,” Lorenz says, grim as can be, refusing to bite.

“O, tragedy. The damage is done.” Claude surveys his waiting men and women. He’s still a fraction too close, encroaching on Lorenz’s space. They refuse to look at one another. “Don’t go dying out there, you bore.”

“Of course I won’t. If it weren’t for me, how would you stay motivated?”

Claude jerks to stare at him. “What?”

Lorenz’s brows draw together. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten. You are the leader of the Alliance, and if you fail to-“

“Oh.” Claude clears his throat. His eyes slip to the side. “Right, that. Sit tight on that thought, all right?” 

Then he’s turning and addressing the crowd, hand on the pommel of his sword and voice raised. Lorenz falls back to stand between Leonie and Ignatz. They’ve just this last push to win. Claude opens the curtains to show the finish. Its inevitability is a spark beneath the feet and the roar of five-thousand strong must reach Edelgard up in her roost.

Claude’s quiet is bright as the day pulled from smoke and cloud, whole and resilient where it strides from the mess of their war. It blankets the army straining its throat when the banners are raised along the line. It crests in all of them. Lorenz, following tracks he’s beaten now for an eternity, does not look away.

Then Edelgard’s life is a scarlet ribbon undone on the edge of the Professor’s sword, but fate has fists in the threads. It takes them over the next waterfall.

“Those Who Slither in the Dark,” Claude muses, near boneless in his chair. The Adrestian palace froths and reels around them, hemorrhaging its losses. Strangers’ blood stains his coat sleeves and there’s a wild light to his eyes. Dismay drips from every word.

“Who the hell came up with that one?” he asks.

The Professor stares at her hands, which have been scrubbed clean, and shakes her head like a puppet with slackening strings.

“This must be our great tragedy,” Claude says later when the hour is late and he and Lorenz sit and watch the fire in a suite at a far wing of the palace.

Lysithea and Cyril are asleep at opposite ends of a velvet couch. Leonie, Hilda, and Marianne are a fused, smudging shadow in another corner. Everyone has left Raphael where he’s fallen asleep on the floor. Ignatz’s thrown a blanket that fails to cover much more than the man’s stomach and lap. He had left a short time ago to make contact with his parents’ past friends in business.

“What’s tragic?” Lorenz drags the palms of his hands together, callouses scraping roughly over each other. “Winning the day?”

“If Fódlan weren’t so… repressed. If either or both of them had reached out – I wish it had been different. Wish I’d - what? Been smarter when I was seventeen?”

“Ah.” Lorenz has been wondering when the catch would come. For all Claude’s forward-turned gaze and dedicated momentum, he feels all things at a depth few can handle under such stress.

“I suspect,” Claude continues, “working with the Kingdom would have saved a lot of skin. And Edelgard was… a remarkable person, perhaps, gone to hideous lengths. Do you know where we would be now if she had chosen to invade the Alliance before the Kingdom?”

“In the ground.” There is no doubt. “But, and listen to me, you fool: this predates you. You’re awfully arrogant, saddling yourself with such guilt.”

It’s softer than anything he would have said even nine months ago. Claude’s staring at him, lips just barely parted. A burning log splits and they both start, looking for a threat that’s not there.

“Not guilt.” Claude closes his eyes. “Is it so bad to mourn things that never came to pass? Isn’t that a kind of death, too?”

There is a vault not deep within him that swims with memories aching to drag him down. The time for processing will come but cannot be borne before they have finished what they’ve started. High stakes have put blinders on him and he is a coward, truly, for being so grateful for the diversions of war.

And when Lorenz sinks into this moment at the fire in a dead emperor’s home, Claude more a friend than anything else and sitting beside him, showing a frank vulnerability that puts Lorenz’s helpless hands to shame, he gives into the tide. His loyalty is both a surrender and a resistance.

He won’t act on it, but it lies there in his hands, touching everything he touches, throwing shutters on every word he says and means.

A kind of death? He does not yet know.

“Save the philosophy for another time.” He leans back into his seat, resting his head on the high back. Claude’s not quite tall enough to do the same, and has fallen over the hours into a slouch. His chair creaks when he stretches his legs before him.

“Strange thing for you of all people to say,” Claude murmurs, eyelids low.

“Be quiet,” Lorenz tells him.

“No, you.”

Lorenz refuses to engage further. The silence folds into tiredness, and the flames fade to glowing coals. He dozes in brief moments that feel all the world like troughs between the waves of the day remembered in shuddering fragments, the red against the rest like relief, gouts of fire brighter than the sun behind his eyes.

Claude is snoring when he jolts awake.

“Duke Riegan,” Lorenz says, sleep-heavy, “you idiot, you could have slept in a bed.”

No response. He finds him a blanket.

He sits and waits for morning, adding the first entry to an index of memory to draw on when the war is won and he sits in Gloucester, hundreds of miles from Derdriu and anyone who knows this version of himself he’s built from refuse.

The end drags them down into Shambhala, then the swamps of the central Alliance. Lorenz and Leonie’s horses wade through muck, the water choked and eddying with slime and an oil slick sheen that burns the skin. Their cavalry is relegated to uselessness, stuck to the knotted grasses above water level.

Leonie breaks through the brush immediately before him, swearing as a low-lying branch drags across her thigh. Above their heads, lines of wyvern and pegasi buffet the trees. Lorenz’s horse, secondhand and, he suspects, not purebred, sighs and plods along.

The traveling’s tediousness runs up alongside the absurd shock of the Heroes in rank on the field before them.

It’s hard to believe that they exist in any state of _life_, but when the marsh and the poison have drained, Lorenz is there to witness Claude’s shouted question. He is there, too, when Riegan says nothing at all and Claude’s face crumples, then is overtaken by firm resolve. That same fraying shows about the edges.

How long can one spend propping hope against hope in the face of such meaninglessness?

_A bit longer _is Lorenz’s fervent wish.

Failnaught is an arc of sunbeam. The decisive arrow burns to place, and Claude’s on the ground but safe, smiling past the gravity it must put on his back. The Professor’s shoulders heave with pants. She brings the Sword of the Creator down slow and unhurried at her side.

Lorenz’s final homecoming to Garreg Mach’s walls is a spin of wine and music. Leonie monopolizes his time, too deep into her cups to walk straight. Hilda hands her off to him with a toast. Marianne giggles, red cheeked, when Hilda takes her to dance.

Not a single one of them wears a piece of armor, which means Claude’s dressed down and not bothered with his hair or a shave. There is admitting defeat, and then there is keeping one’s hand above an open flame. Lorenz takes Leonie outside.

“Did I pay my tab?” she asks the flowers into which she is currently wheezing, on her knees in the garden. He’s put her hair up with a leather thong pried off her wrist, and the tail falls unevenly to one side.

“There is no tab,” he reminds her. The night is cool on his neck. He might admit to being drunk, if asked.

“Right. We’re the heroes. We did it.” She passes a hand over her calf, patting up and down, fingers closing over the knife sheathed there.

“D’you think,” she says, mouth turning down, “Jeralt would be proud?”

“Of course.” Lorenz wouldn’t know what Jeralt Eisner would or wouldn’t approve of, but Leonie doesn’t need to know that. From what he understands, the mercenary could have done quite a bit of squatting drunk in flowerbeds, too.

“And do you think the Professor – ugh, rich-people wine‘s so damn _dangerous_. So _sweet_. The Professor. Is she proud?”

The Professor had been sipping from her cup with the expression of a monk at mass when they made their retreat. But that morning, as the monastery’s towers first came into view, she had smiled.

“Yes, Leonie,” he says. “Everyone is very proud of you.”

“Good. I’m really good at killing things. People, too. And… people-things.” She blinks at him. “Y’know, everyone’s proud of you, too.”

Lorenz’s stomach drops. “Of course. I’ve performed exceptionally, as is my duty.”

“Oh, still on all that, huh?” Her hand collides with his shin, flutters, then falls to the petals. “It’s kinda amazing. Your dad’s gotta be pissed. He looks like a real tool, running away. Uh, no offense.”

“My father,” Lorenz says, the words moving through him from a wellspring long buried, “is a huge tool.”

Leonie seems to enjoy this. She laughs, then vomits. Lorenz’s affront echoes off the stone, and he does not want to be a nuisance, so it’s not loud enough to reach the hall and the celebration within. However, it must be loud enough to signal their location to Claude, who is no doubt _meandering _in a convenient direction.

“Ohh, Leonie,” he goes, sing-song with raised eyebrows and a mean grin. His feet crunch on the gravel. “You good?”

“No,” Lorenz answers for her. “She’s having a bad time. And personally, I’d say it’s well-deserved. Wouldn’t you? You reap what you sow. If you lie with dogs-“

“Wow. This is the best night of my life, actually.”

“-fleas.” Lorenz stops. “Hm?”

“Lorenz Hellman Gloucester, are you drunk?”

Claude shoves his hands in the pockets of his trousers. His shirt is thin and he must be cold, because he’s pulling his shoulders in against the breeze coming down off the mountain. Curls of hair fall into his face, dark and – would it be soft? He wants to know.

“Yes,” he says simply, and wets his lips. In the dark, he cannot be sure that Claude’s watching, but. _But._ The thought does not complete itself, just simmers under his skin.

“Lorenz.” Leonie has survived her sickness. She moans her demand: “Water.”

Claude’s laugh comes out strangled.

“An outstanding idea, my friend.” Lorenz helps her stand. He focuses on his task, and absolutely does not look at Claude. “You must rehydrate, then eat something if you can stomach it. Maybe an antitoxin will help. Claude?”

Claude hums acknowledgement.

“Your assistance, please.”

Leonie casts one way in his grip, then the other. She seems to have forgotten how feet are meant to work. Lorenz may also be forgetting how feet are meant to work.

“Oh, good. What a trio this is,” he says as Claude takes her other side.

“Maybe I deserve this,” Leonie mutters. “Being stuck between _you two_.”

“Hey,” Claude says as they near the party. “That kinda hurts my feelings.”

“We can let go,” Lorenz warns her. “Then you can be stuck between a wall and a bush.”

Leonie attempts some sort of gesture toward Claude, then Lorenz. “Wall. Bush.”

“Bush!” Lorenz huffs.

“Prickly,” she says, and fails to elaborate further.

“Down you go. Yep, right up against that handy _wall_.” Claude gives her a pat on the shoulder when she makes it all the way there. He glances at Lorenz, as if it see if the joke’s landed or lost. Lorenz gives an undecided, simultaneous shaking and nodding of the head. Claude shrugs as if to say _fair enough_.

Then Leonie’s sat outside the hall, legs akimbo. The lighting really does not do her eye-bags any favors, and looking at her makes Lorenz wish to hide his own face. He turns into the noise, eyes narrowing as he contemplates how to water the wilting Leonie with a brain like molasses.

Claude signals to someone who’s scuttling about. They come up in a hurry, then duck away when he makes his request. It happens all so quickly, and with minimal effort on Claude’s part.

“Right,” Lorenz notes, and it’s a soundless shape. He wonders how he has forgotten. “Duke.”

“Claude, did y’know Lorenz thinks his dad is a huge tool?”

“Not dead yet, I see,” Lorenz notes. She tries to kick him. He is not drunk enough to trip in his dodge. He is graceful. He is dignified. He would like to sit down soon.

“No, I didn’t know. Weren’t you defending him just – however long ago?” Claude’s hands are on his hips, and his mouth is very red when he crooks that grin.

“No comment.” Lorenz fusses with his hair. “Actually, yes comment. Let me preface it by saying-“

“Leonie? Are you all right?”

The Professor stands before them, embroidered gown shimmering in the candlelight. She is holding skewered meat that drips juice down her hand as she takes a bite. Her eyebrows crease. She chews like someone half-asleep.

“M’fine.” Leonie ducks her chin and sniffs. “We were just talkin’ ‘bout how Lorenz hates his dad but won’t ad- admit it. Also, I’m thirsty.”

“My word, you are soused.” Lorenz brushes the sleeves of his coat, then neatens his rose, which has fallen a bit out of place.

“Leonie,” the Professor says, and for all its flatness, her tone does its job well. Lorenz straightens on animal instinct. He becomes very conscious of his blinking. How does he normally act? He cannot recall.

“No worries, Teach. We’ve got her,” Claude says, finally seeing fit to intervene. “Are you enjoying yourself?”

“I am.” She inclines her head, and for a brief moment, sea foam hair slipping from behind her ears, clothes glittering, she appears the religious symbol she is. A breath of the divine against gold candlelight. Then she raises the meat and takes another bite.

"Good. Great. Ah, thank you.” Claude takes a crystal glass from the hurried hands of another attendant. It’s iced, and clinks as he kneels to pass it into Leonie’s hands.

The Professor and Lorenz regard each other over his head.

“Your dress is very nice,” he tries. “Did Archbishop Rhea have it made?”

The Professor is a still pool rimmed with black ice. She nods.

“Albinean fabric, yes? I had a kerchief, once. Wonderful stuff.”

“Okay.” Claude stands, and when he’s turned to face Lorenz, he’s biting his lip. “Very interesting. Let’s go eat, Lorenz.”

“Eat?”

“You need to ah, have more wits about you for what we’re about to do.” Claude motions him forward with an open arm. His sleeves are wide and the cream is nearly white against his skin.

“Hmm. Are we politicking, Duke Riegan?”

“Making conversation.” His eyes are laughing at Lorenz’s expense. “Duke Gloucester, you know I’d be lost in this without you.”

“Flattery.” Lorenz peeks at Leonie, who is staring into the middle distance with glazed eyes, swishing a mouthful of water from one cheek to another. “Are we taking Leonie?”

“I’ll watch her,” the Professor offers, which means she would like to hide from the party and all her well-wishers. Lorenz cannot sympathize.

“Then away,” Lorenz says.

So they walk into the din side by side. A cheer goes up around the hall at their reappearance – Lorenz sneaks a glance at Claude, who is letting the attention roll like water off his shoulders. Clinging to casual and cool, then. Even though Lorenz knows it cannot last, he won’t offer criticism.

There is only so much time for them to be themselves. But – he can have this, right here and now, can’t he?

“Boy,” says Judith, as she passes them. “Where is your jacket?”

Claude grimaces. “It’s being put to better use.”

He waves Lorenz’s questioning look away, then loads them plates of finger food that is remarkable in its ingenuity. The monastery chefs have always been innovative. Last he knew, overheard from Raphael, their pantry was woefully low. Still – Lorenz cannot be sure that the greens are not weeds from the courtyard.

Minutes slip through his fingers. He smiles and bows, projecting with Claude the image of a unified front. Hilda comes and goes, picking and choosing her fights, and Lorenz might be bothered if he weren’t so unspeakably pleased. Claude, of course, is right – he is too easy.

Then the polite company has retired for the evening and every warm body in the room is beyond the point of conversation. Claude waits until they are outside again to rub his eyes, then his chin, which is more than shadowed. Lorenz yawns behind his hand.

“One more stop,” Claude tells him, and touches his elbow. Lorenz cocks his head.

Marianne sits alone in the tea garden, which Lorenz has spent hours excavating from bramble. Her face is turned away as they approach; she watches the sky, and the stars that have always seemed just a breath closer to Lorenz this high in the mountains.

Claude’s Riegan coat rests in her lap.

"Thanks for waiting,” Claude says. “Are you cold?”

“No.” She smiles and moves to lift it from her lap. “But aren’t you?”

He makes a short noise, refusing it, and Lorenz rolls his eyes. His jacket is off his shoulders before the thought registers. To save face, he tosses it in Claude’s lap as he bends to take a seat beside Marianne.

“What.” Claude picks it up with a hooked finger. The satin around its collar is a violet sheen in the moonlight. “You’re kidding?”

“Shut up,” Lorenz says, perfectly reasonable and not at all flustered. He takes his own seat.

Claude’s face does something interesting, but whatever Lorenz has seen is gone in an instant.

“Well,” he starts, pulling the jacket over his shoulders, sleeves hanging loose, “along that vein. Do you remember what I said, before, about how we’ll need men like you?”

Lorenz’s mind has come down from its fuzz. Marianne watches Claude, steady and level and a world removed from the version of herself they had met all those years ago. He wonders where Hilda is.

“Yes,” he says, caution like muscle-memory. Somewhere not far from them, someone is playing a fiddle, the music is merry and muted. Claude’s fingers drum the wrought table in time.

“There’s… a lot I want to do, to put it frankly. Maybe too much, but what’s the point of any of this-“ he rolls his wrist, and though it’s vague, Lorenz understands, “-if we can’t really _change_ things.”

Marianne nods, and there is a fire in her eyes that takes Lorenz aback.

“You two are my closest confidants,” Claude says, and each of them takes a moment to absorb the sheer, ridiculous breadth of this truth. Life is full of surprises, and all that. “I trust both your discretion and intelligence but most of all, I trust your goodness.”

His next inhalation trembles.

“So, one more time, my friends. I’ve got this idea…”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Remember when I said I'd post this in two parts? Haha!

The next King of Almyra breaks a six month stretch of unsent letters and diplomatic retreats by climbing through his window. 

Not into the bedroom, with its long drapes and piled rugs, but an adjoining room in which Count Gloucester spends his evenings before sleep. Just this moment, the man himself sits at his favorite chair by a fire banked to small flame. The book in his lap falls closed as he drops a page and stares at the wall across the room. Or, specifically, the window stretching half its breadth, which is ever so slightly rattling in its frame. 

“Well,” Lorenz murmurs to himself, “clearly we haven’t learned to be careful what we wish for.” 

“You nut,” Claude says just as soon as the hinges creak and the largest pane of glass swings away into the night. “You left this unlocked?”

“For a moment,” Lorenz dismisses. “Marianne said you might be by soon.”

“That, and one of your spies spotted me this morning.” His voice is light and wry and familiar as the sun in the sky as he takes in the room. He tugs his sleeves straight, turns to Lorenz, and continues, “For the sake of this fledgling country, I hope they’re not all as poorly versed in the delicate art of subterfuge.”

Lorenz folds his hands in his lap so he won’t take his book by the spine and throw it at his face. He’s too old for his own temper, but Claude sweeps aside every laid brick of composure molded by three long, hard years as a presiding member of the council that has begun forming the United Kingdom of Fódlan’s new government.

“I’ve no idea what you mean.” He’ll receive tomorrow’s reports with a critical ear. If he’s lucky, the comment means Claude is in one of his nicer moods and not posing Lorenz like a domino. “More importantly, Claude: what do you want?”

“You owe me a favor.” Claude moves toward him, booted feet near silent on the glossy wood floor. He shrugs, his shoulders moving powerfully with the motion. “I’m calling it in.”

Lorenz puts a hand to his chin, propping his elbow on the arm of his chair. His hair slips from behind his ear to lie across his lap. He lifts his eyebrows and waits. 

“Damn,” Claude mutters, crossing his arms, “I hate that you’re trying that trick. Won’t you tell me who taught it to you?”

Lorenz becomes a picture of patience. 

“You nut,” Claude repeats, and helps himself to the chair set close to Lorenz’s own. It takes his weight with a groan. He swipes a thumb at the beard growing in on his chin. “For the record, the favor’s a small one. Hardly any trouble for your count-ness.”

“You are digging the hole, Claude. Not climbing from it.”

“We can put on the whole show if you’d like,” he returns, an edge creeping into that easy, affable tone. “But you’d need to wait days for my retinue to arrive. They’re still mucking about in Holst’s backyard, dealing with the last of some - well. You know.”

Military dissidents turned to thieving are the most exciting source of conflict given to their sort, these days. The problem is worse in the south where Edelgard’s army was slow to dissolve. Some trouble is also common not far north into Faerghus. Rebuilding there is costly and slow, and the winters are often lean. Desperation and hunger put edges on even the most placid village.

Claude looks about as well rested as can be expected – especially considering the fact that last Lorenz knew, he was safely at the helm of his father’s country on the other side of Fódlan’s Locket.

“And where are you?” Lorenz asks, the short distance between them a chasm into which he tosses his interest, waiting for the sound of it hitting bottom so that he may gauge its depth.

“Why,” Claude huffs, shaking the tail of his long, dark coat that lacks any sort of royal mark, “right alongside them.”

“Fódlan’s hero,” Lorenz notes. It is a good mood, then, which might be more than he could ask for given their last conversation. “All right, tell me what you’ve decided I’m to know.”

“That’s awfully generous of you.” Claude blinks at him. He’s stretched out his legs to knock the toes of his boots together by the hearth. From this close, he smells like clean air with the sulfurous hiss of his great big lizard right beneath. Lorenz suspects that there is a white wyvern waiting on the roof directly above their heads, but would truly prefer to not know for certain.

“I am a generous man, even to the likes of you.” 

Claude makes a noncommittal noise.

Lorenz stands, carrying his book to its place on a shelf a length behind Claude’s back. The upholstery and wood of his chair creak as he sinks into it, tipping his head to watch Lorenz upside down.

“Come on,” he says, a hint of the man he first came to know showing through, “I thought our agreement was that we only ever say nice things to each other if we’re living in fear of sudden death.”

“I am bound to spend most of tomorrow teasing details of your plan from whatever dark corners you have found to hide them.” Lorenz flattens his hand against the line of books before him. The magic in them sings. “Enjoy my good graces while they’re still about.” 

Claude laughs. “Don’t I always?”

Lorenz could kill him where he sits, loose and comfortable as if at rest in his own home. It has been a while since Claude has seen that Lorenz, too, can kill a man from the distance of a hundred paces. The reminder might do him some good.

But – he’s already admitted to good graces. He bites the inside of his cheek.

“The favor,” Lorenz prompts, skirting Claude to stare into the fire with his hands clasped behind his back. “You may have all night to waste on such flippancies, but I do not.” 

“Waste. Ha.” When Lorenz looks back, Claude is contemplating the deep night outside the still-open window. His brow lowers, shadowing his eyes. “Ignatz found a strange cave.”

“Ignatz is… spelunking?”

“That was my first question, too.” Claude spares him an absent glance, a smile lurking at the corners of his eyes, then inclines his head, his loose hair falling with the motion. “He’s been traveling.”

“Yes,” Lorenz says, and does not look at the autumn landscape hanging above the mantle. “I have bought a painting or two.”

“Or five,” mutters Claude, though he has the courtesy to direct it into his fist. “He said it felt strange, and not a soul in the nearest village knew it was there.”

Lorenz frowns. “Unusual.”

“Totally creepy,” Claude agrees. “And our dear detail-minded artist couldn’t explain what he meant by ‘_felt strange_.’” 

“Did he go very far inside?” 

“No farther than where light still reaches.” Claude steeples his fingers. “There were patterns carved into the walls and floor.” 

“And I am to assume you have some opposing lead? Surely this visit is not entirely tied to a letter Ignatz wrote in a fit of fright.”

It’s somewhat of an unfair assessment: Ignatz’s bravery is undeniable, and though Lorenz would be hard-pressed to admit it, he admires his courage to live a life of unknowns. Dumping familial expectations and building a better suited life from what survived the fall seems much more perilous than ten hour days tethered to a writing desk.

And, in all fairness, Lorenz does know he is the only one of their cohort still running himself over the ruts of the past.

“You can assume what you want,” Claude says. “Whether or not you’ll be right...”

“I can provide some manpower.” Lorenz has a short list in mind at once. “How many do you need?”

“A very small number,” Claude says, vague but purposeful in only the way he can manage. “Perhaps just one from Gloucester.”

Lorenz’s frown deepens. “One?”

Claude leans out of his slouch, hands still pressing together, and looks up at the paneled ceiling. His hair is a study in disaster. Lorenz loathes him.

“One,” Claude parrots, and points at him. “Or, well. If _I_ count, then two.” He turns it back on himself, and his eyes drop to rest on Lorenz’s own, steady and expectant. The emphasis isn’t lost on Lorenz, but he leaves it on the ground, anyway.

“You’re suggesting I leave my responsibilities here,” Lorenz says, unsure of exactly which emotion is crawling up his throat, only that it has claws, “to travel with you to a funny little hole in the ground?”

“Hey, a favor’s a favor.” His glee’s unmistakable, and would be distasteful if some part of Lorenz, dog-like, weren’t perking to attention. “To make you feel better, the old crew’s coming. I know it doesn’t mean anything to you when I say this, but… trust me.”

What a thing to say. Lorenz makes a small, offended sound and pivots on his heel to face the fire again. He tugs at the flames without moving his body and they bend and twist, but the satisfaction of tomeless magic doesn’t last long. Little does, recently.

“A favor is a favor.” He sighs acquiescence to this insufferable man, himself, and the boredom gnawing on the soft parts of his mind. “Let me speak to my council.”

...

Claude reappears at breakfast as all but one of Lorenz’s advisors are taking leave of the room. None of the departing party notice as he glides inside and claims a seat one chair removed from Lorenz. He lifts a serving fork and wields it as a spear, collecting fruit from a platter set at the center. Lorenz eyes him without moving his head. Claude nods his greeting, serious as can be, and eats what Lorenz has saved for dessert.

“Ignore him,” Lorenz instructs the remaining advisor, whose attention hasn’t strayed from Claude since his arrival.

He’s incognito once more, the set of his shoulders and steady gaze simple hints to his true identity. It’s the same as during the war: Claude’s open secret hemmed in by a moat teeming with things too large for the simple, backwater Fódlan intellect to comprehend.

Lorenz’s man starts, then seems to search for his line of thought.

“I – yes. Of course, my lord, I shall tend to matters in your stead,” he says, wiping sweat from his brow, “but I must… emphasize my concern.”

“I won’t be far,” Lorenz tells him. “I have left for much lengthier trips, Lester. I hardly see why this one in particular worries you so.”

Lester’s eyes dart aside. Lorenz hears Claude’s layered clothes rasp as he no doubt raises a hand to wave. Lorenz swallows the urge to close his eyes and sigh. Instead, he gestures him forward and presses a signet ring to his palm.

“It will be fine.” Lorenz sets his napkin by his plate. “And if it is not, I will be within reach.”

Lester had been the least patient of his father’s advisors when faced with Lorenz’s long-winded essays on the great burden of nobility. So, as all others were dismissed or made to disappear, he alone was asked to stay. Lorenz has discovered him preternaturally bright when comfortable. It’s a rare occurrence; Lorenz’s father had spent years undermining his self-confidence.

“It’s really just a trip around the block,” Claude says, unwavering in his endeavor to remain forever unhelpful. “He’ll be back before you know it.”

“Ah.” Lester tightens his hands together and bobs into a quick bow. “I am grateful that it is with you that Count Gloucester will travel, Your M- my lord.”

“Have no worries,” Claude says, his laughter skimming below the surface.

Lorenz, feeling all the world like a child cut from the conversation, raises his voice to address them both.

“As we are all well aware,” he says, shoulders squaring, “I am perfectly capable of looking after myself.”

Lester’s eyes go wide and glazed. He bows again, stammering apologies, while Claude covers half his face and laughs at Lorenz with his eyes.

…

They waste little time.

Lorenz’s traveling pack is light and ready within the span of a few minutes. Claude strolls right along with him from the top floors of the estate to the wide plaza it shares with the long, low form of the stables. He picks at him in his incessant, careless way with every step, testing the pillars of patience Lorenz has driven like posts about himself.

The personnel they pass part in colorful flickers, Ordelia violet, Daphnel green, Edmund blue and Riegan gold swirling together. Their eyes stay carefully averted even as they offer bows. Many of Lorenz’s own staff knew Claude personally during the war and put their good sense to use now by turning their heads when he appears where he isn’t expected. Claude, for his part, at least makes an effort toward regal aloofness when Lorenz is watching.

Early autumn sunlight welcomes them outside. Claude shadows his eyes, which make quick, investigative work of the courtyard’s proportions. Lorenz knows he’s marking exits and counting figures because he has also done the same. The Professor taught them well; the war ironed each lesson into place, sometimes permanently into the skin, and peace isn’t persuasive enough yet to kill habit.

Even under Lorenz’s attention, House Gloucester remains a looming stone behemoth. He’s put color to its face with rose gardens where his father’s austere, dark-leaved brambles hunched before. Every other little detail must wait until after the region has regained its infrastructure in whole, then surpassed that. He does, however, hold some eagerness for the project.

Gloucester itself is a large holding. As a seat of government, the estate’s quiet rooms have transitioned to hold the crowded undertakings of state. Horse hooves clatter, staccato against the grinding wheeling of wagons. The voices raised over that carry to the sky. Each day dawns with a staggering list of tasks; an early start is imperative, and today is no exception.

So though Lorenz is the lord of this house – Gloucester purple inescapable – he and Claude go unmolested through the busyness.

Lorenz’s horse whinnies when she spots him, sides billowing with her breath as she holds her feet still for the groom checking them. Lorenz waits for him to finish, then conveys his enduringly earnest thanks before taking the offered reins. He straightens the braided twist of them, then the line of her bridle. In return, she snuffs his pockets.

Both she and he start when Claude lifts his fingers to his mouth and whistles.

The wyvern drops from the roof of Lorenz’s ancient family home with a cry. It’s small for its kind, he guesses, and the speed with which it moves reveals the history and purpose of its pedigree. For all Lorenz knows, it could be the same wyvern Claude favored in the war. He suspects it might be, because as Claude waits for it to land his expression softens.

The courtyard’s dealings have come to a stop. If Claude had meant to try for subterfuge he has dashed any chance of it. The whispers rise. Lorenz pulls a long breath through his nose.

“I’m afraid something has been lost in translation.” Claude looks from the wyvern to the mare. Now settled, she ignores both he and his reptile and busies herself with lipping the hem of Lorenz’s traveling shirt.

“You may fly,” he says, catching his balance as she nips it and tugs, “but I will not.”

“I’ve seen your stables,” Claude returns, deceptively playful, eyes narrowing in jest, “your wyverns aren’t all that much uglier than ours.”

“It’s not about _aesthetic_,” Lorenz half-lies. “And even if it were, such brightly colored wyverns are a detriment to stealth. I know you think your intelligence too great for error of any kind, but Almyra is not free of oversight. In fact, I believe it to be particularly prone-“

“You are so wrong in so many different, embarrassing ways it’ll take me all morning to tell you exactly how,” Claude says, clean and level as the edge of a sharpened knife at rest, pleasant as a poisoned cup of tea. His smile is all mouth, no eyes.

Lorenz bites his tongue and finishes securing the items of his pack too important or dangerous for other hands. His knuckles drag over the reinforced covers of his tomes, and his fingers catch in the buckles. An internal monologue begins inside his mind, berating him in his own voice.

The chasm between stretches. A current of unease routes through it, reminding him that they haven’t patched the holes they’ve blown into whatever it is between them that they each keep ransom. Lorenz doesn’t know the worth of it. He might have, once, during the war or drunk in a monastery garden.

While Lorenz ruminates, Claude takes his wyvern by the horns and pulls its head against his chest. It huffs and ruffles its wings, which snap and sound like dry leather. Its skin and scales glow a faint pink in the early light.

Lorenz lays a hand on the broad, crested neck of the mare. Her bay coat has begun to lengthen and thicken once more for the advent of truly cold weather. His fingers easily slide through it, and he anchors a hand there as Claude loses himself murmuring nonsense to his flying monster.

“Honestly, Lorenz, not even a Pegasus?” Claude asks when he remembers that Lorenz is standing there, judging him. He’s offering it as a compromise, and it is neither bitter nor endeared. “I’m sure your estate maintains a few that match your unique style.”

Lorenz takes it.

“My _unique style_? Really, must we beat a dead horse?” His mare stomps a hoof. “A dark knight’s mount must be dim of color so that it does not betray itself as a target against the miasma of Reason. Though it _is _traditional, there is purpose to the custom, a method to the ‘madness’ you continue to allege, and frankly, your ignorance of this should shock me more than it does.“

“You’re as informative as always,” Claude says. They reach the end of a script perfected during the long, empty hours of marching. “Good thing we’re meeting up with Hilda and Marianne tonight. One could go mad traveling with you and you alone.”

If Lorenz were a rash man with access to a wide, hard surface, he might have bashed in his own skull right then and there. He settles for smoothing the horse’s silver-flecked forelock, then swinging into his saddle. Looking down at Claude helps his mood lighten just a bit.

“_As always_,” Lorenz says, not bothering with sincerity, “I am so thankful to you for telling me this at the last moment.”

Claude’s mouth twitches at the corners. Around them, the courtyard has returned to task, every hardworking body at last finding it more reasonable to move about their day than stand and watch the Count and the Almyran prince needle each other. It is – perhaps not an unusual sight.

Claude’s wyvern hunches low to the ground at some slight signal, tucking its wings and turning its ugly head to watch Claude vault himself onto its back. From there, he requires little more for flight. Failnaught is held at his side by a clever set of clasps. His sword hangs from his hip. Lorenz guesses that he has a hand axe hidden somewhere within reach.

“Not the last moment,” Claude disagrees. When the wind blows, his hair moves with it. The sight of him astride a white wyvern is almost unreal, like a dream come to life with all the terrible war bits removed. “Amateur.”

“Every word from your mouth is an insult to the decency required from someone of your station.” Lorenz evens his reins, resettles his weight, and his horse steps forward. At once, all the luxurious lounging chairs of his estate fade in comparison to her liquid stride.

“Yes,” Claude humors him, jostled by his lizard’s excited bridling, “and every breath I draw is an assault on your noble bloodline. I think I remember how this bit goes .”

“As long as we are on the same page.”

Their shared glance as he passes Claude does little to settle his mind. House Gloucester bores holes into his retreating back, and he feels his compulsion to stay and continue his work drag behind him like a weighted line. It snaps when he emerges from the lichgate to the sound of Claude’s wyvern crying out and taking to the sky.

He looks over his shoulder, but in a brief moment, Claude has become no more than a shadow against the sun.

…

Claude spends the day flying circles above him. They follow the trade route north, then branch east toward Goneril. Lorenz eats his lunch in the saddle. The light is strong and the shade cool, and the great forest at this edge of Gloucester clings to low hills that offer open vistas. Yellow fans through every sweeping view, the trees shocked cold in the last few weeks. Soon, they will be red and gold and breathtaking. Farming communities along the way emerge at uneven intervals, revealing the sky in huge patches, bringing the scent of brewing cider.

There is heavy enough traffic; peace has opened the door to prosperity. Each discovery of a foreign food or contraption founds a new trade. Travel, though still not strictly safe, beckons to more. Claude has been proven correct. True to form, this means mainly good things for the people of Fódlan.

The dissenters, however, continue to make themselves known. A significant portion of Lorenz’s effort has been put toward their often messy handiwork. By the time he returns to his duties, there will likely be another report ready for him to sigh at.

Evening comes as they pass through the last bit of undeveloped land between Gloucester and Cordelia. They’ve been lucky: the weather holds, and the way is clear.

Claude has flown off once again when Lorenz sights a spot of familiar blue.

He pushes on, saddle-sore in earnest, and spots Marianne before she notices him at the top of a short knoll. From this distance and in this light she is little more than a smear of pastel against the green and yellow of the woods. Their horses, fresh in the encroaching cold, recognize each other and tuck their heads into the gallop, then spin to a breathless stop close enough to touch. His smile comes without any effort at all.

“Dorte seems well,” he says, laying the words over what wants to be a laugh. The stallion strikes at the dirt, dark hoof huge and deadly. His coat is fully white as he reaches the end of his teens, but it is long and full and gleaming, House Edmund’s sweet blue complementing its creamy undertones.

But the one who looks best is Marianne. She’s taken to wearing her hair down and long, the sides gathered with a braid that hangs down the back. A silver necklace adorns the elegant line of her neck, hanging a moon pendant against her skin. That and the shining ring on her smallest finger are Hilda’s work, and likely worth a fortune.

Marianne herself sits tall in the saddle, hands neat before her. Her answering smile flashes white in the gloaming.

“He likes Angelica,” she says, like it’s a secret. Then, with a knowing edge, she asks, “How are you?”

He guides his mare back a step to avoid the squeal he can feel building behind his heels. Dorte stretches his neck and shakes his mane. Around them, the little night creatures begin to sing.

“Just as well as last we met,” he tells her, more sour than he means. “And you?”

“Oh, Lorenz.” She presses her lips together but lets it go, which is more than he deserves. “I’ve never been better, truly.” Then she looks upwards, the quality of her smile changing.

The synchronized sound of beating wings reaches them. One bright spot blurs closer, spiraling a descent in time with a second, darker shape that bears misfortune in the shape of Hilda Valentine Goneril. She comes down adjacent to them, hair a punch of color in the last of the daylight, the twist of her mouth put-off.

“Hilda’s ready for an adventure,” Claude says, as if he’s not just dropped out of the sky. The _unlike you _goes unsaid, but Lorenz bristles regardless.

The white wyvern scrapes little canyons into the dirt alongside the road, snaps its jaws, and stares at Hilda like the lapdogs of Derdriu. She ignores it.

“We’re a bit early for a ten-year reunion,” Hilda says, just shy of a whine. “I’ll admit the fresh air is great, Claude, but I thought I was done with the _camping in the woods_ part of my life.”

“That’s the joy of assumptions,” says Claude. “Sometimes you’re wrong and find so many wonderful surprises.”

Lorenz is thrown back several years to a night drenched in miasmic smoke. He can remember the exact lines of Claude’s face, contrasted in dancing fire torn between warring hands, as he confirmed the ambush_. _They and their friends had risen at Byleth’s nod, ready to fight because Claude’s intuition was in a league of its own. Lorenz felt the tightening of that hand over Failnaught’s grip like his own, knuckles cracking as their sleep-heavy resignation was overrun by the rush before battle.

_I hate when I’m wrong_, Claude said, an arrow already nipped onto Failnaught’s thrumming cord, _but I hate when I’m right more, lately_. It had struck Lorenz then, and strikes him now.

“Ha.” Hilda slides down the side of her wyvern. She crosses to Marianne, the thick pleating of her outfit swinging, offering a hand that she takes, and looks at Claude over her shoulder. “Well, you’re doing the heavy lifting, hot stuff.”

“I am?” Claude raises an eyebrow.

Hilda, who could snap Lorenz in half like a twig, helps Marianne down from her horse. Their hands linger near each other, touching but just barely. She pays Claude little mind, saying only, “Because I don’t want to,” before they set about making camp in earnest.

Claude comes down off his wyvern and untacks both it and Hilda’s, which rolls in the dirt with gusto. The horses are left to doze at opposite ends of a picket Marianne puts together, humming under her breath. Lorenz resigns himself to gathering firewood. He winces through the trees in the near-darkness, a handful of fire lighting his way, and breathes in deep enough to ease the tightening of his ribs.

When he returns to his companions, his arms are full of kindling that scratches at him. Claude appears to have just finished scraping away a layer of leaf litter and is starting to stack a small ring of flinty stones. Lorenz dumps his great burden and the two of them lean each stick against another, wordless and efficient. Their hands do not come close enough to touch.

It’s not until the fire has been set that he realizes Hilda has lost all her hair.

“Lorenz,” she says, frowning. “Why did you have to say it like _that_?”

“It looks nice,” Claude says, sending Lorenz a warning glance, as if he were a dog straying from heel. Lorenz directs a similar look back. “Felt like a change?”

“I’ve been experimenting with clasps.” She ruffles the blunt ends where they hang a short distance from her ears, then brushes the twist of slender chains shining at the back of her neck. “It all got in the way, you know?”

Claude’s smile flickers, briefly. “It’s pretty, regardless of the reason why.”

Marianne returns to Hilda’s side, bending to touch an extended finger to the fire, which is struggling against damp wood. The flames grow and throw shadows across all four of their faces.

“I’m _not _saying it does not look nice,” Lorenz continues, though no one has asked. “In fact, I have been thinking of doing the same.”

“If you cut your hair like that again, you jerk, I’ll kill you myself.” Hilda shakes her head. She takes a moment to regard him. “It’s nice the way it is now.”

“But you can wear it however you like,” Marianne says, reassuring as Lorenz’s fingers find and tangle themselves in the length of it.

“Right.” Claude unwraps a bundle, revealing loaf of dark bread. “Now that you’ve all paid poor Count Gloucester the attention he craves so much… Dinner?”

Lorenz huffs, then asks, “Have you heard the Fódlan tale, Claude, of the pot and the kettle?”

“No,” Claude says. “Here, take this food before you start or you’ll be hungry all night.”

After, Hilda and Marianne leave for a stream not far from their campfire. Lorenz watches the orange flicker of a cupped flame disappear through the trees as he unrolls his sleeping mat and prepares for bed. Their heads had been bowed close, their voices lowered. A thin thread of unease curls through him in response.

But Claude doesn’t let the silence sit for long.

“So we’re really going to do this,” he says, introducing the topic the same as any other that night. It’s said so casually that Lorenz misses the sharp point nestled in the middle of it.

“This? You-“

Then the realization pricks, and Lorenz’s tongue might as well be lead in his mouth. Hilda and Marianne’s absence burns cold at his side. He could be a small, hunted thing, sitting there across a campfire from someone now barely three steps removed from a stranger. Yet – he knows Claude in ways no one else has. Their closeness is a stone he has turned over and over in his palms, wearing it smooth, rubbing each imperfection until it shines.

The question: how deeply has Lorenz ever known Claude? At any point, or at any one place?

_I know the shape of the birthmark on your shoulder_ apposes _all detail I know of your childhood has come from what you’ve murmured in your sleep._

“I’m not apologizing first,” Claude continues, after watching Lorenz’s face shutter. “Just, you know. For your reference.”

“First,” Lorenz ventures, the beat of silence before taking up as much room in the conversation as the word itself. He’s nothing but accommodating, reaching then stretching for the bait. He knows that it is a test, but does not know even the outline of an answer.

Claude raises his eyebrows and lifts a stick to prod the fire.

“Ridiculous.” Lorenz looks into himself to see if the same anger’s still there, curled as a dragon around its hoard. In his mind’s eye, it shows one slit pupil, then turns its head away. He improvises. “If you won’t, why would I?”

“Because you value our relationship.” It’s not what he truly wants to say – his voice is as leaden as the Professor’s those first few days at the academy.

The Professor had needed some time to leave the supposed safety of textbooks. Golden Deer’s lives improved by leaps and bounds when she realized the job could involve more than simply reading weapon manuals then walking them to the training yard in rank so that she might beat them all senseless with a cloth-wrapped training sword.

Lorenz has the sense that this conversation is neither blunted nor meant to fix anything that might be wrong.

Claude flips a log in the pit, smiling at the sparks that hop up and away into the dark. He says, thoughtful, “Because your personality isn’t really that bad.”

_Actually, _Claude had said, before they realized what a mess they were making, one hand in Lorenz’s hair and the other on his waist and brushing lower, _maybe I like you for your personality._

“Mm.” The skin at Lorenz’s side prickles. “So kind of you.”

“You gotta admit, there’s no way I could’ve seen it coming,” Claude says. He sets aside his stick and leans back onto his hands, his undershirt half unlaced at the collar and its ties loose. “What was I supposed to do?”

“Not laugh, for one,” he says, cutting the words crisp and sharp, stiff consonants so unlike Claude’s smooth rhythm. Lorenz pushes himself to the far side of the gulf between them, waiting for anger or bitterness to rise. Then, in their absence, wills it.

“That’s… fair.” Claude shakes his head. “But it’s at least a little funny, right?”

“My mother is a kind, gentle soul. I owe her everything, despite – all of that. I will not laugh along with you at her expense.”

There – if it is about his mother, whom he has loved and been loved by past Gloucester’s rot, he can be bitter to the one person who knew him past his own and expected better.

“She thought we were _courting _even though we’d already finished whatever that was.“ Claude’s incredulous, but there’s a note of something else that pricks at Lorenz. “I was surprised. I laughed.”

“Yes,” Lorenz says, and an anchor the size of Garreg Mach hits bottom in his chest, “hilarious.”

“Right.” Claude folds his arms. “Should I apologize again for being vulnerable and wanting the same thing you did? Forgive me, I forgot the reminder is so offensive.”

“More than you can imagine.” Hilda’s voice drifts closer, and he affects a tone. “But we shan’t fight about it any more… if I hear your apology first.”

“See?” He scuffs the dirt below his feet, then turns onto him a smile too crooked to be fake, squeezing from his lungs. Claude is _tired,_ and Lorenz’s hands are empty and stupid at his sides. “This is why it didn’t work, Lorenz.”

…

They are half a day’s ride from anything with four walls and a roof and Claude is yet to run out of new, hideous ways to prepare their meals. Lorenz has stumbled upon Marianne sneaking handfuls of nuts and dried berries from her saddlebag. He himself has resorted to hiding half their traveling bread in chunks amongst his books.

Hilda eats each bite presented to her and declines to comment. In this silence, Lorenz finds it within himself to pretend at normalcy. It falls short; Claude doesn’t look at him unless it becomes unavoidable.

They lose several hours when Claude strikes out into the wilderness to hunt game after Marianne breaks down at last and Hilda lays a firm hand on his arm. As they sit and wait, Lorenz’s stomach growls at the thought of meat. He tends to the cooking fire himself, and they reach their destination still groggy from a full meal.

The cave lies at the bottom of a soggy hollow. When they venture to its edge, Lorenz’s boots squelch in the peaty mud. Its thick, earthy scent is all he can smell, and both he and Marianne sneeze. Water wells from the mossy stone walls around them, clear and cool, the light upon it glittering through the trees far above. Great softwood conifers ring the sunken pit, which is large enough to fit their animals and belongings with comfort, but only just.

They pitch a tent on the higher ground looking down over the cave’s entrance. Claude hurries about the task, running meaningless commentary over the top of it as they tighten its leads. Lorenz pulls the rope tight in his hands, testing Claude’s strength against his own. He raises his eyebrows when Claude notices and snorts.

Their eyes meet.

“You know,” Claude says, tying off his side, “you don’t tell me to shut up like you used to."

“I will begin again, since you seem to miss it so,” Lorenz replies. He finishes his knot, then lifts his hair from his neck to lay it flat over his shoulder. “Maybe I’ve found it to be a waste of energy.”

From the corners of his eyes, he watches Claude’s good mood dim. “You? Economic with your energy?”

He’s not sure why they’re having this conversation.

“My tiredness is not unique,” he says. The threadbare sound of it would appall his seventeen-year old self. This iteration of himself, however, wants only a nap.

Last night, he had woken from a dream that slipped from his fingers and stared at the stars, aware of Hilda tossing and turning beside him. The sound of rustling leaves and night animals had held them close, covering what might have been the rumbling of a shaking foundation. He fastened the crumbling parts together with an absolute stillness of the limbs like a corpse in its tomb and waited for whatever came next.

The routine is familiar, not comfortable.

“No,” Claude says, daylight bronzing his hair as he fixes him with that apprising gaze. “I suppose not.”

Hilda hacks apart fallen logs a stone's throw from their tent. Her silver axe strikes with brutal efficiency, sounding out into the trees. She’s humming a tune and is not at all out of breath by the end of it, but the skin beneath her eyes is darker than it ought to be.

Then, as in all things, they have embarked upon this journey together. Even without knowing so.

Late afternoon sluices away in tedious tasks more novel than mundane now that Lorenz spends his days in the same comfort of his childhood. The skin of his hands buzzes, happy to touch and be touched by the world as he checks their lanterns, then the boxes someone had lashed to the sides of Hilda’s wyvern’s harness.

As Lorenz finishes checking their few bags of grain, Claude moves past him to face the deeper woods. He stands in front of their camp, Failnaught strung and casually rested upon his shoulder.

Hilda’s head tilts to the side. She sets down the project she’s brought with her, then a long-nosed tool she has been using to shape tiny silver loops.

“What is it?” she asks, rising.

“A friend. What else?” Claude says, feet shoulder-width apart on the dark earth.

Then the sound of a horse pushing through underbrush reaches Lorenz. Leonie arrives on foot, reins looped in her hand, armor clean and weathered Low-sweeping branches part under her hand, and she squints out at them.

“’Lo, Leonie,” Claude calls, shifting his weight and gesturing broadly with his free arm. His Almyran good-luck charms bounce at his hip, uncovered by the coat he’s left hanging from their tent.

“Damn,” says Leonie, mottled leaves falling from her hair, “we’re really out here, huh?”

“Ignatz chased his inspiration.” Claude meets her halfway. They shake hands, and Leonie snorts. “I suppose he found a little more than he bargained for, thankfully for us.”

“Surprised that guy made it this far.” She leads her horse closer, then leaves it there to stand and snuffle at the thin grass. “Hello, Hilda, Marianne. What’s crawled up your ass this time, Lorenz?”

He sputters. “Excuse me?”

“Mercenary work’s really expanded your vocabulary, Leonie.” Hilda’s attention seems hooked like a fish on the line. Marianne’s eyebrows raise, her expression one of mild, polite shock.

Leonie laughs.

“Just a little,” she says. “I’ll tone it down for sensitive ears. Look at him, he still doesn’t know what to say.”

“Aw, come on. Leave him alone, he can’t help it,” Claude says, and it’s teasing enough to break the dam.

“Leonie,” Lorenz starts, “I must express my concern.”

“Oh, must?” Hilda and Claude share a look that Lorenz refuses to decipher.

“You are a respected professional,” he continues, “and far be it from me to tell you how to conduct yourself-“

“But-“ Claude and Lorenz say in unison. Lorenz stops, closes his mouth. Claude holds up his hands in faux-innocence, and he gathers himself, willing away the heat he feels rising on his cheeks.

“_But_. Do you not worry that your – _language_ – may hinder or harm your image?”

Leonie puts her hands on her hips. Her forearms are bare and thick with scar tissue, some bits pinker than others. She’s unchanged from when he saw her last in the spring, all fingers present. That in of itself is comforting. The swearing, however, is not.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” Leonie says. “The more I say _fuck, _the more people listen.”

“Mercs love few things. Vulgarity’s near the top of the list,” Claude agrees. “Also, who cares, Lorenz?”

“Thanks, I guess.” Leonie smiles at Lorenz, then shrugs. “But no worries, okay?”

“I only…” He shakes his head. “All right. I will think on it.”

“There,” Leonie says. She moves back to her horse, deft hands making quick work of the ties holding the patchworked bag across the animal’s back. “Easy enough. How’re things here? Nothing bad happen on your way?”

“Claude did his best to kill us with his cooking,” Lorenz says, because no one else will.

“Did I?” He rubs the back of his neck but leaves any apparent shame behind locked doors.

“Practice makes perfect,” Marianne says, soothing but honest in all things. “How was your journey, Leonie?”

“Boring.” She throws the pack to the ground. It clangs with what sounds like weaponry and armor. Lorenz half expects the ground beneath it to have dented.

“Better than the alternative,” Claude says. “Thanks for coming, Leonie. I feel better, having you here.”

“Anytime. You know you can count on me.”

The words are far more serious than the situation merits, but they ring true. A tension seems to leave Claude, like a string pulled from the limbs of its bow. They of the Golden Deer had pressed themselves into patterns. This – Leonie, short and strong, eyes a clear, burning orange as she stands before Claude – is one.

Few people had understood what Claude meant to them. Lorenz himself hadn’t a lick of comprehension for his own adoration, which had begun from perhaps that first moon at the monastery and endured over the years before the Professor’s return. He has rationalized its steadfastness, swallowed the pieces of it, let it line the insides of a labyrinth he paces alone.

Claude is cut from cloth more fine for its wear. That much, Lorenz has found, is a truth most cannot see. One must lean in to note the marks left by pain. Claude, open-handed and apart, forever a living contradiction of sincerity and detachment, does not simply let anyone that close.

Except Lorenz, who has ruined it.

Leonie has moved to disperse her things about camp. She speaks with Marianne, hair slipping into her face, giving little teases for the ring and the blush. Hilda settles back to her work, but Lorenz catches the way she looks at them as Marianne laughs. The sound is like bells beneath the trees and Lorenz is a war of emotions he resents, seeing the bare softness of Hilda’s private reverence.

He must avert his gaze. When he does, it is to Claude. This too is a pattern Lorenz has made with his own hands. The next sequence is pathetic in its reliability, dogged and condemning: Claude, of course, is already looking at him.

_Imagine, _he remembers him saying, Derdriu a song of water and happy voices outside his open window, _what it’ll be like, once Hilda finishes that damn necklace._

_Did you know, _Lorenz had told him, hair falling into his face and over the pillows, _she has started a ring?_

_Oh no. _Claude’s fingers pushed the strands back. _They’ll take longer than we did._

The gulf between snaps closed. Claude rubs a hand down his face, breaking their stare, and puts his back to Lorenz. He picks up a small bag and slips into the trees, toward the cave, escaping the thing they’ve done as it keens in Lorenz’s chest.

…

“Raphael,” goes Lorenz, feeling his own exasperation coming to a head, “have you brought a hand cart filled just with food?”

“Yup,” says the man, beaming. His hair is longer, gathered in a small tail at the nape of his neck. He pulls along his wooden cart with one hand. The other holds his axe, which he has presumably used to cut a swathe through the forest so that his food may accompany him to their camp.

“I have,” Lorenz says, faint, “no words.”

“You literally just said four of them.” Leonie turns away from him. “Raphael, Ignatz. Welcome to the Golden Deer’s early reunion.”

“Is that what we’re calling it now?” Claude finishes tinkering with his pot over the cook fire. Fortunately, he has not commandeered the use of any rations. _Un_fortunately, that must mean the brew is some tincture of mischief. Lorenz would like to think that it is not of the lethal type; Lorenz may be wrong.

“Ha! No, don’t touch,” Claude says, as Raphael has come to investigate. “It’s not the sort of soup you’d enjoy, my friend.”

“There is always the hope,” says Ignatz as he takes Claude’s offered hand with a firmness that would have eluded him at the Officer’s Academy. His boots are fine but mud-splattered, well worn. The quill in the front pocket of his shirt remains snow-white.

“Claude,” Ignatz continues after they have shaken hands, “thank you for this.”

“No,” he says, “thank _you_. Your letter arrived with a perfect timing I can’t even begin to explain. You are serendipitous as usual, Ignatz.”

Ignatz has become a man of the woods and road. He has traversed their continent by foot one side to another with little more than his paint and brushes. During the war, he was an accomplished bowman and knight, known for both his kindness in camp and his decisiveness in the heat of the moment.

“Agh,” he says now, blushing. “Claude, stop.”

Claude winks.

“Marianne!” Raphael greets, loud enough to grab the attention of all the horses and wyverns. Lorenz’s mare pins her hears.

“Hello,” says Marianne, crossing the camp to clasp one of his hands with both of hers. “How have you been?”

“Oh, you know.” Raphael’s grin is so pleased that Lorenz can’t help but feel a bit heartened himself. “Same as always.”

“His inn is fantastic,” Ignatz says, as Raphael is not one to brag. “Business couldn’t be better.”

“It’s not _my _inn.” Raphael crosses his arms and shrugs like a mountain come to life. “Maya and Gramps do most of the work, you know. I just do the cooking. I don’t have the mind for numbers.”

“But you’ve the mind for culinary arts,” Claude says, playing up his envy.

“Aw,” goes Raphael, “I’ll teach you some things I know, how about that?”

He steps around Claude to the fire and its bubbling pot, taking the stirring rod Claude had lain across its top. The steam rising off it has a purple tinge to it; Lorenz, not without some reason, is sitting apart from it for a reason.

“Well,” Raphael says, “right off the bat, I can tell you that you forgot any kind of meat or potatoes.”

“Please,” says Claude, a little pained as he holds up his hands, “don’t make me say it out loud.”

“Don’t touch that,” Lorenz says. Then, more kindly: “Raphael, it is not for human consumption.”

“Ah.” Claude’s hands rise an inch or two in the air with his wince. “Well, that’s not… strictly true.”

“Claude.” A vein at his temple twinges.

“Present.” Claude takes the rod of contention from Raphael. It makes a delicate sound when he puts it back to place. “Will saying ‘don’t worry about it’ work?”

“No. It will not.”

“Okay,” comes Hilda’s voice as she returns from the cave, which they have been taking turns watching while they wait for the rest of their group. “Let’s all just forget about that and talk about something more interesting, like how Lysithea and Cyril are late.”

“Not by much,” Claude says, because worry has creased the brow of nearly every Deer present. “I’m sure they’re fine.”

Here, Lorenz’s intimate knowledge betrays him again: Claude’s been fiddling about with his powders and potions to keep himself busy. He’ll ease the collective mind and remain on the other side of the wall, analyzing the same pieces of information again and again to make certain that there is, indeed, no need for concern.

“Hilda,” he hears himself say, “you have yet to greet our friends, who have traveled far to join us.”

“Hello, Ignatz.” She bobs a joke of a curtsy. Marianne, who is an enabler, smiles behind one palm. “Looking large as ever, Raphael.”

“Um, technically,” Ignatz interjects, eyes sparkling with that realized quick-wit behind his glasses, “you haven’t said ‘hello’ yet either, Lorenz.”

There’s a round of laughter, and so it goes: patterns, familiar and reassuring. Lorenz can breathe around the stone stuck in his throat even when Claude laughs, too, bright and pleased and honest.

…

The cave breathes at night.

Lorenz, sitting on a log at its entrance, feels the dry air pushing from its throat and cannot find any explanation. He has brought a lantern and a book, but the wick remains unlit and the book secure in its oiled wrapping. The moon hangs at the center of a cloud-scudded sky, bright and waxing near full.

It was a midnight like this one that Lorenz first woke with his arms around Claude.

But that was years ago, and Lorenz is too busy for dalliances and Claude is busier than that, and even if there had been a future in which they came to awareness each morning right there next to each other, it would not last. Claude is to be King of Almyra; Lorenz has a duty he cannot let down.

Logistically, it is an impossibility, and Lorenz is busy raking himself over these same coals when he notices that the lanterns on the rise above him have flared to full intensity.

He’s up and moving within the same breath. They’ve already worn a path from the cave, through the hollow, and up the curving slope, so he has no need to worry about tripping. He’s forgone any sort of armor and his coat is open to his shirt. He tucks both layers closer to himself to avoid snagging on any branches and arrives on the scene to Lysithea, mud-streaked, yelling at Claude.

“You,” she’s saying, “gave us the wrong directions on purpose!” Her hands fly about her like pale little birds, frantic and fast, gesturing a formless but very present danger.

“Lysithea,” Claude says, placating, dressed only in his nightshirt and loose pants, “why would I-“

“You flew through the night?” Hilda asks Cyril. They stand aside with crossed arms, watching the confrontation as Lorenz comes up beside them. Hilda yawns into her shawl while Cyril smothers his own with his shoulder.

“Yeah.” He wipes his brow, then grimaces at all the dirt that flakes off it. “She reckoned it’d be better to get here sooner rather than later.”

“Hello, Cyril,” Lorenz says, Claude’s continued attempts at pacification fading into the background. This is a routine they’ve all seen many times over: Claude follows his tactical retreat around their tents, which now number at three, while Lysithea stalks after him. “I like what you’ve done with your coat.”

Cyril looks at his sleeves, which Lorenz have known to be green but are now brown with muck. His mouth twists, and he huffs a laugh through his nose.

“Thanks.”

“Okay,” Claude says, walking backwards as Lysithea stalks toward him, a white-haired gale that barely comes up to his chin, “so I thought you’d like to see the sights. Spend a little bit of time with your dear Cyril-“

As they pass the fire, presumably stoked anew upon Lysithea and Cyril’s arrival, Lorenz can see the red burning on her ears.

“_Claude_!”

“I didn’t know you’d go rolling around in a mud hole,” Claude continues, laughter making his voice shake. “Really? Couldn’t contain yourself?“

Lorenz moves his hand to pinch his nose. Lysithea’s mouth works, opening and closing, struck dumb and still. Then the night comes roaring in close around her, the magic all at once announcing itself like acid on the back of Lorenz’s tongue.

“Oh, no,” mutters Cyril, going rigid as stone. “That’s real bad.”

It can be like this, sometimes. When Lysithea becomes enraged – when she is _made _to become enraged, the miasma comes calling, shrouding both her and her near surroundings. The apocalyptic hum of it is most certainly unintentional, a symptom of what continues to plague her.

Claude squints into the gathering darkness, serious as sin when he asks, “See?” The quality of his voice has changed. Lorenz, too tired to stop himself, thinks _there you are._

Lysithea grapples with her control, chest rising and falling in ragged breaths that hiss between her teeth. Tendrils of darkness curl and uncurl in a wreathe around her head. Lorenz, preparing his own magic, guesses himself approximately ten heartbeats away from wading in and grabbing Claude by the arm.

“It’s not… usually this bad.” The words tremble, and her shoulders bow on an inside curve, bits of dried filth falling off her.

“But it can be,” Claude says, and Lorenz cannot be the only one who hears the pain in it. He softens, expression drawn as if he’s been struck a metal-edged blow. “Look how easy that was.”

Beside Lorenz, Cyril exhales, long and slow and unsteady.

“You’ve made your point,” Lysithea says, bitter, and though the air clears with a slow, cold gust, something made in the shape of an ache settles in the space left. “I should have known better than to argue this with you, back then.”

“You’re stubborn,” Claude tells her, the spread of his fingers broad on the crown of her silver head. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

“About your scheme having worked?” She bats his arm, and he drops it. “Or about-“

He’s quick to leave it unsaid. “All of the above.”

“Yes, well. So am I.” She bites her lip, drooping like a bough beneath heavy snow.

And at that, Cyril moves. Lysithea and Claude watch him approach with expressions twinned in grief, and when Hilda steps closer to Lorenz to lay her head against his arm, he sighs.

“I did not know that it has…” he murmurs, unable to finish the thought in any coherent manner.

“Claude’s been stressing about it ever since he visited her last moon.” Hilda shakes her head, putting creases in his sleeve. “They fought.”

“Has he – has Claude been arguing with most of us, recently?”

The silky inside of his sleeve shifts on his skin as Hilda shifts to look at his face. “No,” she says, deliberate and with just a prick of a point, “just with the two most stubborn friends he has.”

“Friends,” Lorenz repeats.

“You’re a fool, Lorenz.”

Cyril has drawn Lysithea to the bucket of water set close to the fire. He pulls a handkerchief from a pocket sewn into the inside of his coat, wets it, and sets about wiping her face while she catches her breath, fists clenched. This goes tolerated for only a brief moment before she takes his hand, their fingers interlocking, and commandeers the cloth to clean it.

“Yes,” he says as Claude leaves them all, grabbing his coat on the way out. “To no one’s surprise.”

She yawns again as the front flap of their tent peeks open, Marianne’s face peering from it. Hilda pats Lorenz, a slap made more gentle by her apparent exhaustion, then leaves him, slippers scuffing quietly over fallen nettles and the dirt.

He does not follow her. Instead, he buttons up his coat with fingers numbed by the cold and goes after the biggest fool of them all.

…

“I will tell you what I have noticed,” Lorenz starts, stepping up beside him.

“Please, do.”

Claude’s hands are on his hips. After Lorenz watches him for a moment, he realizes that he is holding his breath for long stretches so that he won’t shiver. This time, Lorenz does not pull off his jacket, though he wishes he would. Instead, he speaks.

“There are gusts of wind from the cave at even intervals.” Claude’s head tilts toward him. “Each is dry, though one would think there is an abundance of moisture deep within.”

He punctuates this with a deliberate step that squishes beneath his boot. The one corner of Claude’s mouth he can see lifts.

“Also,” he says, powerless before his nature, “you are a better man than you think.”

“Ah, a turn of the table. I thought we were fighting, Count Gloucester,” Claude says, a façade that crumbles onto itself even as he stays with it, resilient as ever. Lorenz is unsurprised, then pleased for it. These particular mazes have not shifted so drastically in their time apart that his slapping about in the dark has led him astray.

“Claude,” he admonishes, low, “we are always fighting.”

The moon has fallen to brush the tops of the trees above them. Inside the hollow, the small sounds of trickling water are like silver notes in the cathedral from that year they had first met, almost ten years ago.

“Correction,” says Claude, emerging from his impartiality, “_you_ thought we were fighting from the first moment we met. I had no stake in all that.”

“You had your fun.” Lorenz’s smile is small and unseen but just for him. “The war was different.”

“It was. Before it, I thought you were the strangest man I’d ever met.” Claude bobs one shoulder. “After it, when I had come to know you, I _knew_ you were the strangest man I’ll ever meet.”

“You do,” Lorenz finds himself admitting. “Know me.”

Claude laughs under his breath. “You thought I didn’t?”

“And you think that I do not know you?”

The cave breathes, stirring Claude’s hair. Above them, stars wheel across the sky so slowly the eye cannot catch the motion. Inexorably, without pause, a grindstone over grain, time moves on. There will never be another moment like this one.

“No.” Claude gives in to a shiver. “Maybe it’s that I don’t know myself.”

That puts a hot iron to the soft bits of him.

“Then take my counsel.” Lorenz’s palms are damp even in the cold. “Despite your idiosyncrasies, of which there are many, you are kind and clever beyond measure. You are the only sort of person who should sit on a throne.”

“Am I about to be cut down?” Claude still won’t look at him. “Will this hillside crumble and bury me alive?”

“You are trying to convince Lysithea to go to Morfis with you,” Lorenz guesses, cutting to the matter at hand. It is not unlike the war – superfluous embellishments mean little when one correctly timed thrust may end the fight.Claude pauses. “Frankly, I don’t know if I’m any good at it.”

“She will go.”

Claude hums.

“You are very persuasive,” Lorenz says, teasing because they are alone. “She has little chance.”

“Spoken from experience,” Claude notes. Then, ruefully: “Lorenz, we’ve been asses.”

“Oh,” Lorenz says, as if commenting on the weather, mild despite the clenching in his chest, “you have been an ass. I have been worse. No, do not argue; I know myself in this, at least.”

“I wasn’t going to say it like that. Really, this was a two-man job.” His breath mists, and he drops his arms to tighten his coat around his waist. “I find myself hoping I’ve been forgiven for a crime I’m not sure I committed. What’s got you in this mood?”

“Very well, silver tongue. You belong in a theater troupe.” Lorenz clears his throat. “It is not a mood… But if it were, you would be the cause. What else?”

“See,” he says, as if choking on it, “you told me I was the one who was _too much_ after you made the call, but now you follow me into the dark to make sure I’m not, what – having a fit all by my lonesome? Are you seeing this, too? I’d put you in front of a mirror if I had one at hand.”

“You do not have _fits_.” Lorenz nearly laughs at the thought, his pulse hammering in his ears as he sidesteps every effort toward deflection with his own. “You go somewhere very quiet and think yourself half to death.”

“Lorenz,” Claude says, and it sounds tortured.

“Present,” he mimics, and knows it is not dissimilar.

“Will we talk about it?”

_Not yet_. “Why did you need me for this?”

“I wanted you here.” His hands spread before him, palms up and empty, then drop. “But when I climbed in through your window I thought I’d made a mistake, you were so mad.”

“Not at you,” Lorenz says, thinking of his evenings before the fireplace, alone with his unforgiving thoughts. “I owe you more than a favor.”

Claude shakes his head. “You owe me nothing. I was playing, that’s all.”

“Almyrans must have a strange way of playing, then,” Lorenz ventures.

“I wouldn’t know.” He mutters something Lorenz can’t catch, then says, “People tend to underestimate outsiders. And when they realize that they have, they get mean.”

“Yes,” Lorenz says, because he had seen it happen right before him at Garreg Mach.

“Did you know,” Claude asks, “that in Almyra, there are no crests?”

“I’ve heard.”

“Nothing even like them exists, there. There’s just a hell of a lot of sky and some humans running around beneath it, loving and hurting each other.” He rubs his hands together, bracing. He steers himself to smoother waters, lightening. “To many of my father’s people, archery is a cowardly way to participate in the glorious endeavor of warfare.”

“You are the bravest person I know,” Lorenz says. Then, he amends, “Beside Ignatz. Or Marianne.”

There’s a hint of a real laugh at his side. “A gracious third place! I’ll treasure this moment, thank you.”

“You are ever so welcome.” Lorenz flexes his fingers, which have gone stiff.

The silence that follows is not the sort that cradled them in Derdriu, but it is shallower than the breach Lorenz came face to face with in his sitting room just days past. He’s been lulled almost to a peacefulness that’s undermined by the way Claude’s staring, unfocused, into the dark.

He says, “You should sleep. Tomorrow, you will finally be able to explore your cave.”

“_My _cave.” Claude pulls at his sleeves. More time passes, and Lorenz perches on its edge. “One more thing.”

“Yes?”

“My wyvern gives me a tactical advantage in Almyra. It’s much harder to see a white against the sky than brown or gray. They’re fairly rare, though. Mine was a gift from my father’s father. We were born in the same week. She hatched on my sixth birthday.”

“None of that had occurred to me,” Lorenz says, a frenetic energy thrumming inside him. “I have heard you call her by name, but I do not know what it means.”

“Badra.” Claude scruffs at the back of his head, mussing his hair further. “Full moon. I was a poetic thinker, mind you.”

“My horse is named for my mother’s favorite tea,” Lorenz confesses.

“You’re almost too easy,” Claude tells him, then starts a slow turn toward the path to camp, an invitation thrown with one downwards cast glance. He holds his shoulders very straight. “My mother hates tea.”

“Then perhaps she has not tried a kind that suits her.” Lorenz falls into step beside him, kicking water, failing to discern dry patches from the wet.

“She was an Alliance noble. There is absolutely no tea in the known world she hasn’t tried,” Claude says. “She hated your father, when they were our age. She thought he was a snake. I asked.”

“You asked your mother about my family?”

Claude lengthens his stride for the hillside, drawing ahead. “You haven’t asked your family about her?”

“She was an archer, in her academy days,” Lorenz says to his back. “She disagreed with your grandfather and uncle on many things.”

“My mother disagrees with slavery,” Claude says. “But she’s fine with murder for a cause, I guess.”

And _that_ has water under it. He tiptoes around it, saying only, “I see.” Through the trees ahead of them, the campfire is a small glow.

“You’re tired,” Claude says, looking over his shoulder as he moves into the clearing. “I’m sorry to have kept you up all night.”

“Ugh,” comes Leonie’s voice, thick with tiredness. “I so did not hear that.”

Lorenz, despite himself, feels a flush crawl up his neck. “_Leonie._”

She’s sitting guard by the fire, which has burned down to coals. A pair of boots too large to be her own glisten with fresh oil in her lap. The cant of her mouth is mischievous; Lorenz distrusts it at once.

“That’s my name,” she drawls. “Dawn is a few hours out. You’ll have time to get some sleep.”

“Thank the stars for small favors,” Claude says, and immediately cuts and runs, ducking into the tent and leaving Lorenz there.

“Those are Ignatz’s boots,” he notes, ignoring his bed roll for now.

Leonie blinks, caution narrowing her eyes. “They are.”

“I see,” he says in an entirely different tone than before. Then he walks away.

“Oh, you bastard,” Leonie calls after him, loud enough to carry but soft enough it won’t wake their old classmates. “You’re wrong!”

Of course he’s not wrong – Leonie’s been dancing around that one for an age and a half. He waves her goodnight over his shoulder with a smile she won’t see.

When he goes inside, the tent is dark and quiet. Claude’s a dark shape on the other side of the many-armed lump that is Marianne and Hilda curled together. His own roll has been laid out already. He does not dwell on this for fear of pain.

Sleep comes at once, and in his dream he sees wide skies from the back of a wyvern pale as snow. It means nothing and everything and he knows both of these things even as he sits there, wind in his face, Claude a warm weight before him.

_Will we talk about it?_

He wonders.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took forever because I was waffling on pulling the trigger or not. Sorry! I hope you'll stick around for Act III.
> 
> I told you the Chainsmokers title was a warning. You know those ships that you automatically want to see divorced? Then see get back together while all their friends watch and wince? That's claurenz for me. Please don't be (too) mad.

**Author's Note:**

> Returning to fic courtesy of horrible little man Lorenz Hellman Gloucester, whose name I refused to pronounce properly until about one month ago, which was when this fic first came to life in a rabid moment at 1am in the notes of my phone.
> 
> I can't make promises about when part two will be ready, but it's throttling me. Hehe! :)
> 
> I'm on [twitter](https://twitter.com/socksunn).
> 
> (yeah, title's a Chainsmokers lyric, and yes, it is a caution sign.)


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